David Frum | The Atlantichttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/2018-02-20T16:17:54-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>As the rest of America mourns the victims of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, President Trump took to Twitter.</p><p>Not for him the rituals of grief. He is too consumed by rage and resentment. He interrupted his holidaying schedule at Mar-a-Lago only briefly, for a visit to a hospital where some of the shooting victims were treated. He posed afterward for a <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964724390637244417">grinning thumbs-up photo op</a>. Pain for another’s heartbreak—that emotion is for losers, apparently.</p><p>Having failed at one presidential duty, to speak for the nation at times of national tragedy, Trump resumed shirking an even more supreme task: defending the nation against foreign attack.</p><p>Last week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian persons and three entities that conspired to violate federal election law, to the benefit of Trump and Republican congressional candidates. This is not the whole of the story by any means. This Mueller indictment references only Russian operations on Facebook. It does not deal with the weaponization of hacked information via WikiLeaks. Or the reports that the Russians funneled millions of dollars of election spending through the NRA’s political action committees. But this indictment does show enough to answer some questions about the scale and methods of the Russian intervention—and pose a new question, the most important of them all.</p><p>The new question is this: What has been—what will be—done to protect American democracy from such attacks in the future? The Russian attack in 2016 worked, yielding dividends beyond Vladimir Putin’s wildest hopes. The Russians hoped to cast a shadow over the Clinton presidency. Instead, they outright elected their preferred candidate. Americans once thought it was a big deal that Alger Hiss rose to serve as acting temporary secretary general of the United Nations. This time, a Russian-backed individual was installed in the Oval Office.</p><p>From that position of power, Trump has systematically attempted to shut down investigations of the foreign-espionage operation that operated on his behalf. He fired the director of the FBI to shut it down. His White House coordinated with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to misdirect the investigation. He mobilized the speaker of the House to thwart bipartisan investigations under broadly respected leadership. He has inspired, supported, and joined a national propaganda campaign against the Mueller investigation.</p><p>And all the while, Trump has done nothing—literally nothing—to harden the nation’s voting systems against follow-up Russian operations. On Sunday, he publicly repudiated his own national-security adviser for acknowledging at the Munich Security Conference the most incontrovertible basics of what happened in 2016.</p><p>It’s worth thinking about what a patriotic president would have done in Trump’s situation. He would be leading the investigation himself. He would be scouring his own campaign—doing everything in his power to reassure the country that whatever the Russians may or may not have done, his government owed Putin nothing. He would have imposed penalties on Russia for their outrageous acts—rather than protecting Russia from penalties voted by Congress. Above all, he would be leading the demand for changes to election laws and practices, including holding Facebook to account for its negligence.</p><p>At every turn, Trump has failed to do what a patriotic president would do—failed to put the national interest first. He has left the 2018 elections as vulnerable as the 2016 elections to Russian intervention on his behalf.</p><p>The president’s malignant narcissism surely explains much of this passivity. He cannot endure the thought that he owes the presidency to anything other than his own magnificence. “But wasn’t I a great candidate?” he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965205208191168512">tweeted</a> plaintively at 7:43 a.m on Sunday morning.</p><p>But Americans who cherish democracy and national sovereignty need to start discussing a bigger and darker question.</p><p>Authoritarian nationalist parties across the western world have outright cooperated with the Russians. Russian money has <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39478066">helped to finance</a> the National Front in France, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/europe/czech-republic-russia-milos-zeman.html">election and reelection</a> of the president of the Czech Republic. In Germany, Russia first <a href="http://time.com/4955503/germany-elections-2017-far-right-russia-angela-merkel/">created</a> a hoax refugee-rape case—then widely publicized it—in an effort to boost its preferred extremist party in that country’s 2017 election, the Alternative for Germany. Russia <a href="https://www.zdf.de/assets/allies-the-kremlin-the-afd-the-alt-right-and-the-german-elections-100~original">supported</a> pro-AfD comment in media favored by Germany’s surprisingly substantial Russian-speaking communities.</p><p>CIA Director Mike Pompeo <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42864372">predicted</a> to the BBC at the beginning of 2018 that Russia “will be back” to help its preferred candidates in November 2018. To what extent does President Trump—to what extent do congressional Republicans—look to Russian interference to help their party in the 2018 cycle?</p><p>Most observers predict a grim year for the GOP in 2018. But the economy is strong, and selective tax cuts are strategically redistributing money from blue-state professionals to red-state parents. The Republican National Committee commands a huge financial advantage over its Democratic counterpart. (Things <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/">look more equal</a> at the level of the individual candidates.) A little extra help could make a big difference to Republican hopes—and to Trump’s political survival.</p><p>Nothing has been done in the past 15 months to prevent that help from flowing. You have to wonder whether the president does not privately welcome that help, as he publicly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ">welcomed</a> help from WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.</p><p>Trump’s own tweets reveal that among the things he most fears is the prospect of Representative Adam Schiff gaining the gavel of the House Intelligence Committee from the clownish present chairman, Devin Nunes. How far would Trump go to stop a dreaded political opponent, inside the law and outside? How far has Donald Trump gone in the past?</p><p>Trump continues to insist that he and his campaign team did not collude with Russia in the 2016 election. We know that they were ready and eager to collude—that’s on the public record. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”) The public does not yet know whether the collusion actually occurred, and if so, in what form and to what extent. But in front of our very eyes we can observe that they are leaving the door open to Russian intervention on their behalf in the next election. You might call it collusion in advance—a dereliction of duty as grave as any since President Buchanan looked the other way as Southern state governments pillaged federal arsenals on the eve of the Civil War.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedLeah Millis / ReutersAmerica Is Under Attack and the President Doesn't Care2018-02-18T10:29:06-05:002018-02-20T16:17:54-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553667Trump’s gravest responsibility is to defend the United States from foreign attack—and he’s done nothing to fulfill it.<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/553298/"></iframe>
<p dir="ltr">“The Trump Republican party shames itself every day,” argues <em>The Atlantic</em> writer and David Frum. “Some people think we’d be better off if the GOP just went out of business. That’s dangerous advice.”</p>
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<p dir="ltr">In this video, which highlights key points from Frum’s article, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/frum-trumpocracy/550685/">“An Exit from Trumpocracy,”</a> the self-identifying conservative explains why the Republican party has become “radicalized” and continues to move away from the path of democracy. After all, “it’s not a coincidence that Breitbart.com was founded by Californians,” says Frum.</p>
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David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedConservatives Must Save the Republican Party From Itself2018-02-14T12:19:53-05:002018-02-14T12:19:53-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:178-553298David Frum argues that if the Republican Party believes in democracy, its politicians must fight for it.<p>In the winter of 1858, Abraham Lincoln answered an admirer seeking advice on the study of law. Where should a beginner start? Lincoln replied by <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:67?rgn=div1;view=fulltext">citing</a> a basic library of works by four authors. Two were American; two were English. Lincoln did not assert an “Anglo-American legal tradition.” He took it for granted, as has every American lawyer and judge before and since.</p><p>Such basic concepts as “torts” and “felonies” are English—other legal systems are organized quite differently. The conception of the judge as a disengaged regulator of a trial, rather than an active participant in it, is English too. Not only sheriffs, but also bailiffs and grand juries originated in England. U.S. constitutional law is derived from Great Britain: <a id="Correction1" name="Correction1"></a>The “cruel and unusual punishments” clause of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is reproduced verbatim from England’s 1689 Bill of Rights.<a href="#Correction">*</a></p><p>As a reader of <em>The</em> <em>Atlantic</em>, you surely already know all this. I would fear that I’m wasting your time by repeating these basics of American history—if we had not just emerged from a 36-hour <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43039040">social-media rage-spasm</a> against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for merely referencing these incontrovertible and familiar facts. “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement,” Sessions said in a speech.</p><p>“Do you know anyone who says ‘Anglo-American heritage’ in a sentence?” Senator Brian Schatz tweeted in response. “What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling.” That storm has subsided, as social-media storms so often do. I sense that some of the participants now feel a little sheepish about the whole thing. But maybe it’s worth talking about it a little longer, because there are some authentically valuable lessons to be learned from the episode.</p><p>One of the great positives of the Trump presidency is the way that it has forced a confrontation with wrongs and evils too often shrugged off. The overwhelming visibility of President Trump has projected his lifelong cruelties and brutalities onto the world’s hugest Jumbotron for all to see—and from that sight, millions of decent Americans have decently recoiled.</p><p>But if the recoil is powerful enough, it can propel those feeling the recoil to extremes where they would never have voluntarily traveled. Taking offense at mention of the Anglo-American legal heritage is merely absurd. For Conan O’Brian to <a href="https://twitter.com/conanobrien/status/955100835784077314?lang=en">rebuke</a> Trump’s “shithole” comments by posing with a tropical drink in the aquamarine water of a Haitian resort is to pass from the absurd to the insensitively cruel. Fewer than half of Haitians have reliable access to water, the World Bank <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/05/27/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-water-in-haiti">reports</a>; almost 10,000 have died of cholera since 2010.</p><p>And the worst of the anti-Trump political reactions may wait ahead. In reaction to Trump, many Democrats are speaking as if immigration enforcement is inherently immoral, as if every Trump voter is a deplorable racist, as if the proper response to Trump's ethnic chauvinism is an equal and opposite counter-chauvinism.</p><p>The most hopeful possible outcome of the Trump presidency would be that it jolts America to its better self—that it reaffirms democratic norms, recalls Americans to civility and character, and reinvigorates the political center. The most dangerous alternative outcome would be that Trump’s pendulum swing to one kind of illiberal extreme generates momentum for an extreme swing in the opposite direction. Speaking of Britain, we’ve seen in the United Kingdom that anti-system political energy has flowed toward Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, flecked by anti-Semitism. In Germany and Italy, the ultra-left has grown in tandem with the far right. It could happen here too. It may be happening here too.</p><p>It’s a supremely important question for the future whether anti-Trump energies restore moderation—or instead inspire counter-radicalization. The overheated reaction to the Sessions non-gaffe demonstrated how the question can be answered wrong. Deep breaths and calmer second thoughts, please.</p><hr><p><em><small><a id="Correction" name="Correction"></a><a href="#Correction1">*</a> This article originally stated that the "cruel and unusual punishments" clause was in the Fifth Amendment. We regret the error.</small></em></p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / ReutersAttorney General Jeff Sessions delivers remarks at the National Sheriffs' Association Winter Conference in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 2018. The Anti-Trump Recoil Goes Too Far2018-02-14T10:25:45-05:002018-02-14T13:08:57-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553292The overheated reaction to comments by Jeff Sessions dramatizes the need for a backlash that restores moderation—not one that swings the pendulum to the opposite extreme.<p>“There is no such thing as a <em>succès d’estime</em> in America. That’s why it is a French phrase.”</p><p>Tina Brown never lacked for success in the American fame-and-money sense of the word. Yet for all the acclaim that has come the way of this legendary magazine editor, Brown has also been persistently underestimated. Brown observes of herself: “The perception of me is flashy, fast, and scandalous.” Now Brown has published a <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/thevanityfairdiaries/tinabrown/9781627791366/">memoir</a> of her spectacular journalistic career, based on the diaries she kept during her tenure as the editor of <em>Vanity Fair</em> from 1984 through 1992. The book has gained praise, yet even the praise often retains the familiar grudging character accorded to Brown’s editorial accomplishments. As a reviewer wrote in <em>The New Yorker</em> (a magazine that owes its existence to Brown’s rescue from a readership collapse under her two predecessors): “Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”</p><p>Brown’s new book offers an opportunity to test that querulous judgment. Here not only is her voice and sensibility, but also her searching and candid self-assessment.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Through the 1980s and 1990s, Brown remade first British and then American magazine journalism. Brown reinvented the celebrity profile and celebrity photography. She printed close-up investigations of the murderous misrule of dictators like Haiti’s Duvalier family and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa. When a trove of new Picasso drawings was discovered, she hired the painter’s most scholarly biographer to explain them. She published forensic profiles of the Gary Hart sex scandal and of the murder of the primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda. Her rule was high-low: high culture joined to low gossip, insisting on the highest standards of accuracy and narration for both. She deployed known writers in unexpected ways, while generously promoting new talent. It was Brown who assigned Adam Gopnik to Paris and who liberated Malcolm Gladwell from newspaper reporting. “An editor’s job is to make people say yes to something they hadn’t thought they could do,” and that role Brown fulfilled to the utmost again and again.</p><p>Brown was never a “writer’s editor” and always a “reader’s editor”: “Writers, unless guided and edited and lured out of their comfort zones, can go off-piste into dreary cul-de-sacs of introversion and excess and entirely forget about questions of content and pace.” This is incontrovertibly true, and for that reason utterly unforgivable—by writers, that is.</p><p>Yet even as her titles gained readership, rewards, and respect, Brown’s peers and rivals credited her achievement not to her own vision and drive, but to her willingness to pay large fees. <em>The New York Times’</em> then-description of her “sprinkling gold dust” still rankles her, all these decades later. It rankles me too, but for the opposite reason. I experienced the Brown editorial method personally, and while money certainly occupied a place in her instrument chest, it by no means predominated. At that time, just after the 2009 recession, gold dust lay a lot thinner on the ground for print journalism than in the gaudy 1980s. Brown had launched a website, <em>The Daily Beast</em>, which had just merged with the tottering <em>Newsweek</em>. She took me to lunch to ask: What would it take to hire me at the <em>Beast</em>? I suggested what seemed to me an attractive number.</p><p>She asked if she could consider overnight. Of course, I replied.</p><p>The next day she called me. Would I accept $5,000 more than I had asked for?</p><p>That isn’t something that happens every day, at least not to me, and so I failed to perceive the metal cage suspended above Tina’s tempting bait of cheese. That unsought $5,000 crackled in the air every time I got an email at 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening asking if there were any way I could produce 800 words on a fast-breaking news story by 7 a.m. the next morning—or if instead of the contracted three articles per week, I could just this one time squeeze in a fourth.</p><p>The strange thing was that somehow I always <em>could</em> squeeze in that uncontracted column—and enjoy doing it too. Tina rewarded effort not only in dollars and cents, but also in enthusiasm. She didn’t just ask for an article before breakfast the next day. She asked for “one of your always brilliant articles.” She didn’t merely extract more work than contracted. She explained, “I never can have enough of you.” Obviously, this was practiced art, but how amazing that she had practiced it so well.</p><p>If something was “lost” in Brown’s editing career, as <em>The New Yorker</em>’s reviewer suggested, the most important of those somethings—on the evidence of this book—was Brown’s own voice. In all those years devoted to coaxing better work out of balky writers, one great writer was persistently sacrificed: Tina Brown herself.</p><p>“You can teach people structure,” Brown observes early in her diary-memoir, “and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things.” Brown is a writer who notices and notices and notices.</p><p>Here is her brief observation of a legendary 1980s trophy wife:</p><blockquote>
<p>Her eyes were starey with strain and the quest for perfection. She looked worn down by the French lessons and the piano lessons and the <em>cordon bleu </em>taster menus for every dinner party she hosts. She’s a very, very talented designer … but that’s not enough …. She never gets to collapse in her designer jeans … and recuperate from her week competing. She has to go to Florida to shoot with the Kluges. To Mar-a-Lago to a house party of the Trumps. She has to look wonderful, have inventive sex … and go to a black-tie dinner every night of the week. No wonder she looks like a zombie.</p>
</blockquote><p>Here is her vignette of 1980s-vintage Donald Trump:</p><blockquote>
<p>“What do you think of the <em>Newsweek</em> cover story on me?”<br><br>
“I haven’t read it,” I told him.</p>
<p>“You know, Tina, I could have had <em>Time</em>. They wanted me and I saw them, too. But <em>Newsweek</em> scooped them. Who do you think’s better, Tina, <em>Newsweek</em> or <em>Time</em>?”</p>
<p>“<em>Time</em>,” I said mischievously.</p>
<p>“You really think so, Tina, you really think so?” His pouty Elvis face folded into a frown of self-castigation. “I guess it sells more,” he said in a tormented tone. “I guess it does.”</p>
</blockquote><p>Here is how a truly wealthy man raises money for a fashionable cause:</p><blockquote>
<p>Preening like a ringmaster, he surveyed the circle of high-roller guests and declared, “Okay, my friends, who’s going to buy some tickets to these great literary evenings?” A business face from the back yelled, “For you, Saul, ten K” … Within 10 minutes Saul had raised a hundred thousand dollars for something he surely cares not a whit about, and the bidders care less … “I can raise up to a million in an hour,” Saul told me cheerily, “more than that, it gets a little tougher.”</p>
</blockquote><p>Tina Brown’s story is that American classic: the striver arriving to make a mark in and upon New York. This time, the striver is a woman and mother of two, struggling with those affections and those claims in a way no man-on-the-make ever has. She found herself locked in savage emotional competition with a psychotic nanny, whom she overhears on the phone saying, “I hate her. Georgie [Brown’s son] hates her. He loves me … I want to choke her.”</p><p>Brown grew up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, in a milieu in which money was too scarce to offer a scale of status. Her father worked in the threadbare British film industry, a comfortable but not a lavish life. She arrived in a New York that had plunged into a money mania unparalleled since the Jazz Age. The wealth geyser erupted, pushing the city’s rich into a new social stratosphere—of which Brown designated herself the most astute and intimate chronicler. Her role both delighted and troubled her. “Why do I keep seeking out the things I deride?” she wonders. She never does find the answer. Yet also she never loses awareness of the discrepancy between her economic situation and that of the high society she mingled in, a discrepancy that provides many of her book’s most comic moments.</p><p>In April 1985, the very young Tina Brown, just a year into the editorship of <em>Vanity Fair</em>, had already emerged as a dominant figure in American magazine journalism. But she had a problem familiar to many New Yorkers: an unsatisfactory apartment. After two days without running water, she decided she must move. Her landlord refused to allow realtors to show the apartment on behalf of Brown. The editor of <em>Vanity Fair</em> had to take time off work to buzz potential subtenants into the building. “Tell Tina Brown she just gotta sit there and let the parties in. Tell her, yeah, it’s an inconvenience. But she just gotta live with it.” Why must Tina Brown gotta live with it? Because “Jonny Guerrero don’t deal with no intermediaries.”</p><p>Thanks to Tina Brown’s deft pen, Jonny Guerrero—wherever he may now be found—will live in the history of the 1980s alongside Henry Kissinger and Henry Kravis. Brown has preserved in vivid perpetuity a moment in social history. As John Bunyan, who coined the phrase <em>vanity fair</em>, wrote in <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>:</p><blockquote>
<p>This fair is no new-erected business, but a thing of ancient standing … At this fair are all such merchandise sold: as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts—as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.</p>
</blockquote><p>These were Tina Brown’s interests as a great editor, and they are her material as a writer. If you object that her interest in such things should be dismissed as unworthy, go file your complaint at the same office where they are accepting petitions against the duc de Saint-Simon and Marcel Proust.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedNeville Elder / Corbis / GettyThe Tina Brown Diaries2018-02-11T07:00:00-05:002018-02-12T16:41:29-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-552869In a memoir about her tenure at the helm of <em>Vanity Fair, </em>the legendary editor deftly crystallizes moments in social history.<p>On New Year’s Day, 1996, future Trump campaign chair Steve Bannon was charged with three misdemeanor counts of domestic violence by the Santa Monica police. The charges were eventually dropped when his then-wife did not appear at the trial. On the day that she called the police to her house, however, she told them that at the beginning of their relationship, there had been “3-4 arguments that became physical,” according to the <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000156-c3f8-dd14-abfe-fbfbbe310001">police report</a>. They had gone to counseling, though, and she told police that there had “not been any physical abuse in their arguments for about the past four years”—until the violent altercation that day.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Bannon’s predecessor at the Trump campaign also faced criminal charges for violence against a woman. Corey Lewandowski was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/corey-lewandowski-arrested/475827/?utm_source=feed">arrested</a> in Florida on March 29, 2017, on misdemeanor battery charges. On March 8, Lewandowski had grabbed and pulled aside a reporter, Michelle Fields. Fields photographed and tweeted the bruises on her arm. Lewandowski denied that he touched Fields until contradicted by video evidence. The state attorney ultimately decided that there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges, and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/13/politics/corey-lewandowski-donald-trump-charges-dropped/index.html">dropped</a> the case.</p><p>President Trump himself has been the target of allegations of violence against the women in his life, most notably his first wife Ivana. During their 1990 divorce, Ivana swore in a deposition that Trump—in a rage about an unexpectedly painful scalp-reduction surgery performed by a surgeon she had recommended—had yanked a handful of her hair from her head and forced himself upon her sexually. The deposition further claimed that she spent the night locked in a bathroom weeping. The next morning, Trump asked her, “with menacing casualness, ‘Does it hurt?’” A copy of the deposition was obtained by a Trump biographer and quoted in a 1993 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Tycoon-Lives-Donald-Trump/dp/1626543941">book</a>. (The book would later be amended with a statement by Ivana, after the divorce settlement, acknowledging that in her deposition, “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”)</p><p>So there is some context as to how it could happen that the Trump White House could decide to overlook an FBI report that two ex-wives of a senior staffer had alleged he had a history of domestic battery. White House staff secretary is a crucially important job. The staff secretary controls the White House document flow, determining much of what the president sees and does not see. The job is powerful, and has conferred power on many of those who have held it: Jon Huntsman Sr. under President Nixon; Richard Darman under President Reagan; John Podesta under President Clinton; and Harriet Miers and future appeals judge Brett Kavanaugh under President George W. Bush.</p><p>It’s a fascinating question why the Trump White House would not regard domestic violence as a cause for concern for the holder of this office, and not only as a matter of decency and established precedent. As long ago as the Reagan administration, a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission was <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1988-05-15/news/mn-4183_1_charlotte-fedders">compelled to resign</a> after a divorce proceeding revealed his history of domestic violence.</p><p>Violence at home indicates a dangerous temperament for a high official, including vulnerability to blackmail. Few targets for blackmail could be more attractive than the person across whose desk flow so many of the secrets of the presidency—and who can do so much to guide or blind the president’s view of the world. Yet it’s also easy to understand why a White House and campaign team so prone themselves to violence against women would shrug off the FBI’s information about Rob Porter as nothing so very serious, and certainly not disqualifying. We are very forgiving of sins we have committed ourselves or can imagine ourselves committing.</p><p>Trump excused his “grab them by the pussy” comment as “locker-room talk.” In fact, the way we talk reveals the way we think. This president sent a message to the people around him about what is permitted, or at any rate, what is forgivable. Is it any surprise that they heard his message—and complied?</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedEvan Vucci / AP White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter, center, hands President Donald Trump a confirmation order for James Mattis as defense secretary on January 20, 2017.Why Didn’t the White House See Domestic Violence as Disqualifying?2018-02-08T13:04:54-05:002018-02-08T13:44:04-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-552806That the president’s staff was unable to recognize the seriousness of the allegations against Rob Porter may reflect how many members of his team have faced similar claims—including Trump himself.<p>“Presidential power is the power to persuade.” So wrote the famous student of presidential power, Richard Neustadt, in 1960. </p><p>This is one power that Donald Trump has never appreciated. President Trump uses words often and uses them spectacularly: to mobilize his core followership, to bully and belittle opponents, to tweet his hurts and grievances. What he does not do is argue a case to change minds and gain consent.</p><p>That gap in the presidential repertoire of power was on view in last night’s State of the Union address—and especially in its core policy argument, Trump’s case for his latest immigration-reform proposal.</p><p>Trump has moved far and fast on immigration. He is now proposing a path to citizenship for the DACA population, people who entered the United States illegally as minors. He has extended the deadline to qualify for the program, boosting the estimated beneficiaries from 800,000 to potentially 1.8 million. While he suggests remaking the immigration system so as to curtail the right of new immigrants to sponsor relatives—putting an end to the sponsorship of siblings, nieces, nephews—that change <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/455798/trump-immigration-preemptive-surrender">would not go into effect</a> until all the 4 million people who have already applied have entered the country, a process that critics warn could take as long as 17 years.</p><p>The only change in the direction of immigration restriction that would go immediately into effect is the end of the diversity visa lottery. Yet even this move will not reduce America’s total immigration intake: The 50,000 to 100,000 slots at issue would be reallocated to speed the entry of the 4 million relatives in the sponsorship queue.</p><p>In other words, if Trump’s proposal were accepted, his first term would feature the biggest immigration amnesty since 1986; no near-term reduction in numbers; and the tilt of the whole system even further in favor of family reunification. He would trade all that for money for his boondoggle border wall. He did not even ask for more workplace enforcement. (Business lobbies do not like effective enforcement, and therefore neither do most congressional Republicans.)</p><p>No president has moved this far, this fast, toward his opponents’ position on a domestic-policy matter since Bill Clinton seized welfare reform from Republicans in the middle 1990s. Yet unlike Clinton—who made welfare reform the centerpiece of his devastatingly effective <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36646">1996 State of the Union address</a>—Trump’s rhetorical effort at persuasion almost certainly failed.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>We’ll know better when the poll results begin to appear later today, but I’ll step out onto the limb here and predict that Trump will not shift immigration waverers into his column. I’ll predict that—despite all his concessions—he will not even succeed in making himself look moderate and the Democrats extreme on this issue.</p><p>Trump cannot reason, and his writers will not and do not. In arguing against chain migration, Trump made the following point.</p><blockquote>
<p>The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration. Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. </p>
</blockquote><p>Many who heard these words must have wondered: What is the president talking about? How does it protect the nuclear family to curtail the sponsorship of cousins?</p><p>Yet the president has a case! As the system has clogged under weight of numbers, the waiting time for spouses of U.S. citizens has stretched. A successful application regularly takes more than a year. The spouses of resident aliens cannot get a green card at all. There really is a tradeoff here, with costs that many Americans will care about—but Trump did not explain that tradeoff, and so likely failed to persuade even those who stood most directly to benefit from his plan.</p><p>Trump’s proposal maneuvers Democrats into an extremist position. Democrats shut down the U.S. government earlier this month over two issues: children’s health insurance and protection of the unlawful immigrants they call “Dreamers.” Once the government shut, the Republicans instantly conceded on the first—leaving Democrats in the awkward position of denying services to citizens on behalf of the illegal entrants.</p><p>Leaders of the Democratic Party—and especially the 2020 presidential hopefuls—now seem to regard almost any form of enforcement against people illegally present inside the United States as a racist denial of human rights. The only change party leaders will contemplate is for higher total numbers and lower legal standards. Two weeks ago, <em>The New York Times</em> published an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/opinion/ravi-ragbir-immigration-ice.html">op-ed</a> denouncing the deportation of a man who had lost his green card after being convicted and serving prison time for eight counts of wire fraud. Under U.S. law, his crime should have cost him his residency rights. Twelve years later, he’s still here—and the possibility that the law might yet go into effect is presented as an outrage in the country’s most important newspaper. This is not a freakish outlier opinion either. On January 29, a judge in Manhattan released the alien in question from detention, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/nyregion/judge-released-immigrant-ragbir.html">complaining</a> to thunderous courtroom applause that he had been deprived of his “freedom to say goodbye”—which would seem quite an unnecessary freedom for one who apparently will never be made to leave.</p><p>Yet Trump cannot make a political resource of his opponents’ rising radicalism and intransigence. His trademark truculent imperiousness inevitably casts him as the unreasoning extremist. He cannot forbear falsifying his case even when he is right.</p><p>Building an immigration system upon sponsorship of extended families has a lot wrong with it, but it is not an important risk factor for terrorism, as the president tried to argue. The <a href="https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/who-are-terrorists/">overwhelming majority</a> of the Islamic terrorists who have struck the United States since 9/11 are here because their parents immigrated to the United States. The most heinous terrorist to enter on a family-reunification visa was the wife of the San Bernardino shooter, himself the native-born son of immigrant parents. Trump’s proposals, once fully in effect in the 2030s, would improve the skill level of the immigration population and possibly reduce the risk of radicalization among their offspring—but that’s a guess, not a promise.</p><p>Meanwhile, in a speech that alludes to the worst gun massacre in U.S. history but offers not a word of policy in response, it seems ludicrously disproportionate to present a huge immigration-policy reform as a response to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/us/new-york-possible-explosion-port-authority-subway/index.html">a terrorist attack</a> that killed nobody and seriously injured only the would-be bomber.</p><p>Overhauling the U.S. immigration system in the 21st century will require major changes. An economy on the cusp of revolutions in robotics and artificial intelligence should not import huge numbers of low-skilled workers. A society that has just laid the foundations of a national health-care system cannot afford immigrants who will, over their working lifetimes, pay far less in taxes than they will draw in benefits from the Social Security and Medicare systems. </p><p>But major changes only happen if they can command broad support from many different constituencies. Donald Trump acts as if he believed his own fantasy that he won a landslide victory in 2016 and—as he said at the opening of his speech—as if he “speaks on behalf of the American people.” Neither of those things is true. On immigration, he does not even speak on behalf of the majority of his own party. His style of power is furtive, clandestine, and extra-legal—perfect for compromising the FBI, not so good for passing big laws. Reforming immigration will take a very big law indeed. President Trump is not nearly a big enough man for that job.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedLeah Millis / ReutersThe Unpersuasive President2018-01-31T08:34:38-05:002018-01-31T10:06:19-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-551945Despite moving sharply toward his opponents’ position on immigration, the president again failed at the essential task of his office.<p>Election 2016 looked on paper like the most sweeping Republican victory since the Jazz Age. Yet there was a hollowness to the Trump Republicans’ seeming ascendancy over the federal government and in so many of the states. The Republicans of the 1920s had drawn their strength from the country’s most economically and culturally dynamic places. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge won almost 56 percent of the vote in cosmopolitan New York State, 65 percent in mighty industrial Pennsylvania, 75 percent in Michigan, the hub of the new automotive economy.</p><p>Not so in 2016. Where technologies were invented and where styles were set, where diseases cured and innovations launched, where songs were composed and patents registered—there the GOP was weakest. Donald Trump won vast swathes of the nation’s landmass. Hillary Clinton won the counties that produced 64 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even in Trump states, Clinton won the knowledge centers, places like the Research Triangle of North Carolina.</p><p>The Trump presidency only accelerated the divorce of political power from cultural power. Business leaders quit Trump’s advisory boards lest his racist outbursts sully their brands. Companies like Facebook and Microsoft denounced his immigration policies. Popular singers refused invitations to his White House; great athletes boycotted his events. By the summer of 2017, Trump’s approval among those under thirty <a href="https://www.axios.com/just-20-of-americans-under-30-approve-of-trump-poll-1513305162-f7b9920b-3eda-4c25-be42-3f3995672345.html?source=sidebar">had dipped</a> to 20 percent.</p><p>And this was before Trump’s corruption and collusion scandals begin to bite.</p><p>Whatever Trump’s personal fate, his Republican Party seems headed for electoral trouble—or worse. Yet it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. As the next presidential race nears, it will become ever more imperative to rally around Trump. The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="302" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/01/9780062796738/5b777f5a2.jpg" width="200"><figcaption class="caption">This article is adapted from Frum’s <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062796738">book</a>.</figcaption></figure><p>Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.</p><p>In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more. That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.</p><p align="center">***</p><p>“The divide is not between the left and right anymore, but between patriots and globalists,” <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-fn/frances-le-pen-launches-election-bid-with-vow-to-fight-globalization-idUSKBN15K0R1">declared</a> Marine Le Pen, announcing her candidacy for the president of France in February 2017. Those words sat ill in the mouth of a candidate <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39478066">funded</a> by secret Russian money, but they contained at least this much truth: The old ideological compass did not provide a very accurate guide to the new political map.</p><p>Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html">polled</a> better among workers earning between $50,000 and $99,999 than with those earning over $100,000, a freakish outcome for a Republican. He posted <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/10/donald-trump-got-reagan-like-support-from-union-households/">the best showing among union households</a> by any Republican since 1984. He performed <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/trump-did-better-blacks-hispanics-romney-12-exit-polls-n681386">surprisingly well</a> among Latino and black men, boosting his share in those two demographics above the level of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.</p><p>Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton—excoriated by the right-wing media as a radical and a socialist—scored exceptionally well among the richest Americans, winning almost exactly half the votes of those who earn more than $250,000 per year. She did <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/20/14061660/women-march-washington-vote-trump">extraordinarily badly</a> among white women without a college degree, losing that group to Donald Trump by the staggering margin of 27 points. How could this be? In the fall of 2016, <em>New York </em>magazine interviewed six women who had decided not to cast a vote in the Clinton-Trump election. One, identified as a thirty-year-old teacher, <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/women-who-are-not-voting-2016-election.html">had this to say</a>:</p><blockquote>
<p>I do not believe that feminism can “trickle down”—that having more women on corporate boards will make life better for working-class women. If your primary concern is creating gender parity within the upper class, it’s rational to support Hillary Clinton. If you are a working woman, things aren’t so clear.</p>
</blockquote><p>Throughout most of their lives, members of the postwar baby boom generation (those born between 1945 and 1960) held views <a href="http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/legacy-pdf/11-3-11%20Generations%20Release.pdf">considerably more liberal</a> than those of the generation before them (born between 1930 and 1945). As late as the year 2000, only 35 percent of baby boomers described themselves as “conservative.”</p><p>Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, <a href="http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/legacy-pdf/11-3-11%20Generations%20Release.pdf#page=27">42 percent</a> of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.</p><p>It’s important to understand what right-leaning baby boomers mean by the word “conservative.” On social issues such as gay rights and the role of women, boomers, like all Americans, continued to evolve in liberal directions in the Obama years. Nor did aging boomers adopt a more pro-business outlook. On the contrary, boomers in the 2010s expressed much <em>more </em>suspicion of business than the same demographic cohort did in the 1990s, when they were younger and otherwise more liberal. Boomer conservatives exhibited little enthusiasm for the “on your own” ideology of the mainstream GOP. In fact, 64 percent of boomers complained in <a href="http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/legacy-pdf/11-3-11%20Generations%20Release.pdf#page=76">a 2011 poll</a> that the government didn’t do enough to help older people, a much higher proportion than in any other age group, including their elders.</p><p>Boomers adamantly rejected any cuts to entitlement programs—and by <em>larger </em>margins than their elders of the 1930 to 1945 cohort. If necessary to protect those programs, a majority of boomers would breach the ultimate conservative taboo: They would accept tax increases on high earners. Paul Ryan conservatives they were not.</p><p>Here’s what those right-leaning boomers <em>did </em>mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort <em>most </em>likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors. They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.</p><p>It would be easy to caricature these views as the politics of “I’ve got mine.” But look again at the contrasting generational experiences: People born between 1930 and 1945 entered the workforce just in time to ride the longest boom in middle-class living standards from beginning to end. They bought their first houses when housing was cheap and sold their empty nests in the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. The youngest of them had qualified for Medicare before the Republicans took control of Congress in 2010, and all of them were exempted from the cost cutting projected by Paul Ryan. The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat … well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.</p><p>“Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/our-ridiculous-approach-to-retirement.html">reported</a> Teresa Ghilarducci of <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em>. They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal. The slogan “Keep the Government’s Hands Off My Medicare” was easily mocked, but it actually stated a perfectly plausible position: Who else but the government <em>could </em>lay hands on your Medicare? Among Americans aged 50 to 64, agreement with the sentiment “government has become too involved in health care” rose 16 points between 2009 and 2013. (Among Americans over 65, by contrast, agreement with that sentiment rose <a href="http://www.people-press.org/values-questions/q41hh/concerned-government-becoming-too-involved-in-health-care/#age">only eight points</a> over the same period.) These Americans were not ignorantly denying that the government paid for Medicare. They were indignantly objecting lest government pay for anything else. As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.</p><p>In a close and careful 2011 <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop.pdf">study</a> of the politics of the Tea Party, three Harvard scholars, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, remarked, “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the <em>perceived deservingness of recipients</em>.” Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who <em>had </em>worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.</p><p>The Tea Party was often described as a libertarian movement, opposed to big spending and big deficits. And certainly those were themes often sounded by Republican candidates in the 2010 primaries and elections. But that’s not what Tea Party voters and rally attenders cared about. Here’s <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/21018/">a piece of oratory</a> from the TV star made by the Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck, then on Fox News:</p><blockquote>
<p>Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it? Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore? Do you read the headlines every day and feel an empty pit in your stomach … as if you’re completely alone? If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different. Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all. We surround them.</p>
</blockquote><p><em>We versus them. </em>Not state versus society. Certainly not revenues versus expenditures. <em>We versus them. </em></p><p><em>In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. </em>I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016. Of the U.S. residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born. As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”</p><p>The social scientist Robert Putnam <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract">observed</a> with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.</p><p>Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.” They repeated the performance in 2015. “We will lift our sights again, make opportunity common again, get events in the world moving our way again,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/15/jeb-bush-to-formally-launch-presidential-campaign/">declared</a> Jeb Bush in his presidential announcement address. “I want to talk to you this morning about reigniting the promise of America,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-ted-cruzs-speech-at-liberty-university/2015/03/23/41c4011a-d168-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html">said</a> Ted Cruz in his, and Marco Rubio likewise <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/04/13/full-text-of-marco-rubios-2016-presidential-campaign-announcement/?utm_term=.2246003fe64f">hailed</a> “our nation’s identity as a land of opportunity.”</p><p>“Believe in America!” “A new American century!” <em>What are they talking about? </em>wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century. Donald Trump, the oldest candidate on the Republican stage, was also the first to discern that the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/07/biggest-share-of-whites-in-u-s-are-boomers-but-for-minority-groups-its-millennials-or-younger/">most common age</a> for white Americans in 2015 was 55. These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.</p><p>Donald Trump created in effect a three-party system in the United States, by building a new Trump Party in between the Democratic and Republican Parties. In the decisive state of Pennsylvania, for example, Trump and the successful Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Pat Toomey, won almost exactly equal numbers of votes: 2.97 million for Trump; 2.95 million for Toomey. But Trump and Toomey won their votes in very different places. In Pennsylvania’s four richest counties—Chester, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware—Toomey received altogether 177,000 more votes than Trump. In all the rest of the state, Toomey ran well behind Trump.</p><p>One poll <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/?utm_source=feed">found</a> that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.</p><p>Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.</p><p>Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency. The best justice is reconciliation, urged Desmond Tutu as he chaired South Africa’s inquiry into its past. That was also the teaching of America’s greatest president too in the country’s most searing agony of trial. If Lincoln could say it then, we can in this so much less harrowing passage surely repeat:</p><blockquote>
<p>Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.</p>
</blockquote><hr><p><small><i>This article has been adapted from David Frum’s recently released book, </i><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062796738">Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic</a>.</small></p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedScott Morgan / ReutersPresident Donald Trump exits the stage following a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June 2017.An Exit From Trumpocracy2018-01-18T11:48:01-05:002018-01-18T17:49:32-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-550685The stability of American society depends on conservatives finding a way forward from the Trump dead end.<p>We’re nearly a full year into the Trump presidency. Steve Bannon has been removed from the NSC Principals’ committee, and then purged from the Trump circle. Stocks are up, taxes are down—at least for most people, at least for now. The ATMs continue to dispense cash; there has been no nuclear war. Factor in that a complete interloper, an unreliable rule-breaker, has just vaulted into spectacular prominence with a mega-selling new book crammed with salacious warnings that the president is succumbing to the first stages of dementia.</p><p>All in all, it’s the perfect time for a round of thoughtful conservative punditry boldly to challenge conventional wisdom and proclaim that the Trump presidency, like the old joke about Wagner’s music, isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.</p><p>The reversal of the conventional wisdom would be welcome to many news consumers. It’s fatiguing and upsetting to be told every day that something has gone dangerously and importantly wrong with the government of the United States. And after all, people have business to do with the administration: bills they want signed; regulations they want relaxed. Other people work for that administration. Nobody wants to be made to feel like an enabler or collaborator for shrugging off a few irregularities and getting on with his or her work. And isn’t that work the real story—much bigger and more important than the president mumbling the words of the national anthem at a football game?</p><p>If abnormality continues long enough, it becomes normal. Chronic illness; a barrier that closes a once-open border; the death of a loved one: There is nothing that cannot lose its power to surprise and shock. The phrase “President Trump” once supplied a joke to <em>The Simpsons</em>. By now, we have all got used to hearing and saying it. It is our reality.</p><p>We have gotten used as well to the publicly visible consequences of that reality: the lying, the bullying, the boasting. It seems useless to keep complaining, and so by and large the formerly unacceptable has been accepted. Trump’s “very stable genius” remark got traction because it was so much more extreme than usual; his usual stream of thoughts, any of which would have generated headlines coming from previous presidents, now largely pass unnoticed. We have gotten used, too, to a routine level of disregard for the appearance of corruption: the payments from lobbyists and foreign hotels to Trump-branded properties; the flow of payments to the presidential family from partners in Turkey, the Philippines, India, and the United Arab Emirates; the nondisclosure of the president’s tax returns.</p><p>We have gotten used to the president’s party in Congress sabotaging and discrediting the investigation into foreign manipulation of the U.S. presidential election. We have gotten used to the dwindling of the State Department, the paralysis of the National Security Council, and presidential attacks on the independence of prosecutors, the FBI, and the Department of Justice. We have gotten used to the party of the president pushing through vastly significant laws without hearings and even without accurate estimates of their costs and consequences. We are becoming used to state parties rewriting local election laws explicitly to impede voting by people who might vote against them.</p><p>When we worry about democratic decline in the United States, it’s important to be clear what we are worrying about: corrosion, not crisis. In a crisis, of course we’ll all be heroes—or so we assure ourselves. But in the muddy complexity of the slow misappropriation of the state for self-interested purposes, occasions for heroism do not present themselves. On the contrary, the rhetoric of “resistance” comes to seem disproportionate, strident, cranky. Most things continue to operate more or less as they used to do. When the administration seeks to do something improper, oftentimes it is prevented—by the bureaucracy, by the courts, by the administration’s own bottomless inefficiency and distractedness. And if a few things get through, or more than a few—we can tell ourselves that soon enough things will return to normal. The adults who are failing to discipline Trump in the here and now can surely be trusted to clean up after him in the by-and-by.</p><p>Yet the unacceptable does not become more acceptable if it is accepted by increments. If you flow with the current, you’ll be surprised where you end up. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KS9HAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA238">observed</a> a century ago. The saying is true, but it was not meant as a compliment. It will take a strong dose of unreasonableness to save the country from the destination to which it is tending. </p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersAmericans Can't Afford to Grow Used to This2018-01-09T12:24:26-05:002018-01-09T12:53:39-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-550064A year into the presidency of Donald Trump, the country is in danger of accepting the unacceptable.<p>“I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”</p><p>This morning’s presidential Twitter outburst recalls those words of Fredo Corleone’s in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg8jODlrka0">one of the most famous scenes</a> from <em>The Godfather </em>series. Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/949618475877765120">tweeted</a> that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” and in <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/949619270631256064">a subsequent tweet</a> called himself a “very stable genius.”</p><p>Trump may imagine that he’s Michael Corleone, the tough and canny rightful heir—or even Sonny Corleone, the terrifyingly violent but at least powerful heir apparent—but after today he is Fredo forever.</p><p>There’s a key difference between film and reality, though: The Corleone family had the awareness and vigilance to exclude Fredo from power. The American political system did not do so well.</p><p>Michael Wolff’s scathing new book about the Trump White House has sent President Trump spiraling into the most publicly visible meltdown of his presidency. Until now, Trump’s worst moments have occurred behind closed doors, and have become known to the public only second-hand, leaked by worried officials, aides, and advisers. Yesterday and today, we have seen a Trump temper tantrum in real time on Twitter, extended over hours, punctuated only by stretch of fitful presidential sleep. Trump’s <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/949498795074736129">tweets yesterday</a> focused largely on the blockbuster Wolff book, <em>Fire and Fury</em>.</p><p>It may not be the newsiest—arguably it is the <em>least</em> newsy—but the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.</p><p>Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.</p><p>The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.</p><p>Before the Saturday morning tweets, what should have been the biggest story of the week was Trump’s success at mobilizing the Senate and the FBI to deploy criminal prosecution as a weapon against Trump critics. The Senate Judiciary committee—<em>the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!</em>—formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/05/trump-dossier-author-steele-fbi-326613">Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said</a>; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.</p><p>The Department of Justice can ignore such a referral. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The FBI has come under relentless abuse from Trump, who complains about its refusal to do his will. Is it now yielding?</p><p>We also learned this week from <em>The New York Times</em> that aides to the attorney general <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/politics/trump-sessions-russia-mcgahn.html">sought damaging information</a> on Capitol Hill about FBI Director Comey, indicating close cooperation between the White House and Main Justice to exert political control over the country’s chief law-enforcement agency.</p><p>Michael Wolff has drawn the most indelible picture yet of Donald Trump, the man. But the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.</p><p>In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.</p><p>What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative-media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the culture wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.</p><p>After the Trump pardon of Sheriff Arpaio for obstruction of justice, a popular conservative blogger <a href="https://twitter.com/kurtschlichter/status/901258810966200320?lang=en">tweeted</a> this justification of the president’s shocking attack on the rule of law: “The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. The new rules, bitches. 😎 ” </p><p>However crazy Trump may be, in one way he is indeed the “very stable genius” he claims to be: Trump understands how to mobilize hatred and resentment to his own advantage and profit. He has risen higher than Joe McCarthy or Charles Lindbergh or Theodore Bilbo—and he has lasted already nearly a full year in office, holding the approval of one-third of the country, more than sufficient to keep him there for a full term.</p><p>Michael Wolff has done a crucial service, showing more intimately than any reporter yet the true nature of the man at the center of the American system. But without the complicity of other power-holders, Trump would drop from his central position like a tooth from a rotten gum. What we need to do now is widen the camera angle beyond Fredo Trump to the hard-faced men and women over his shoulders. Those are the people who put Trump where he is, and keep him there, corrupting the institutions of American democracy and troubling the peace and security of the world.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedParamount Pictures / IMDBDonald Trump Goes Full Fredo2018-01-06T09:52:53-05:002018-01-08T09:38:22-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-549875But unlike the <em>Godfather</em> character, the president of the United States is backed by powerful people enabling him.<p>Leave to the psychoanalysts the question why Korea seems to provoke President Trump to more reckless comments than any other international problem. What the world must live with are the consequences.</p><p>Again and again since Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has said and tweeted provocative denunciations not only of North Korea, but also of America’s supposed ally, South Korea.</p><p>In April 2017, on the eve of South Korean presidential elections, the president gave an <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-southkorea-exclusive/exclusive-trump-vows-to-fix-or-scrap-south-korea-trade-deal-wants-missile-system-payment-idUSKBN17U09M">interview</a> to Reuters that punched two sensitive points. He threatened to rip up the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It is unacceptable, it is a horrible deal made by Hillary,” he said. “It’s a horrible deal, and we are going to renegotiate that deal or terminate it.” In that same interview, Trump demanded a billion-dollar payment for a high-altitude missile defense system. That demand reneged on an agreement reached by Trump’s own administration, by which the South Koreans provided the land for the system and the United States provided the weapons. It probably will not surprise you to learn that the free-trade agreement was not, in fact, negotiated by Hillary Clinton. Most of the work was done under President George W. Bush. The agreement then stalled in Congress after the Democratic victories of 2006, until President Obama’s trade negotiators revised it to provide more advantages for U.S. automakers. Accurate or not, Trump’s comments sent South Korean stock and currency markets into a tumble.</p><p>Trump’s pique with South Korea might be explained by an embarrassment he had suffered in the country two weeks earlier. Apparently misunderstanding a Pentagon briefing, Trump had boasted in an April 12 Fox Business <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/despite-talk-of-a-military-strike-trumps-armada-was-a-long-way-from-korea/2017/04/18/e8ef4237-e26a-4cfc-b5e9-526c3a17bd41_story.html?utm_term=.c6e63a60e03f">interview</a> that he was personally and immediately sending a “very powerful” “armada” into Korean waters to menace North Korea. That armada—the aircraft carrier <em>USS Carl Vinson</em> and support vessels—was then photographed thousands of miles away heading in the opposite direction, passing between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra en route toward India. Trump’s mistake was criticized by South Korean politicians and mocked in the South Korean media. The Reuters interview may have been payback.</p><p>That interview had the unintended effect of helping to boost the more U.S.-skeptical of the South Korean presidential candidates in the May 9 election. In midsummer, speaking at his New Jersey golf retreat without a single South Korean present, Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005346140/north-korea-trump-threat-fire-fury.html">promised</a> to visit “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon North Korea. In September at the United Nations he warned that he might “totally destroy North Korea,” adding “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his region.”</p><p>As a candidate for president, South Korea’s Moon Jae In had opposed the deployment of missile defenses, urging negotiation with the North instead. Now as president, this conciliation-minded leader—already inclined toward skepticism of the United States—daily confronts a new strategic reality: His country’s most important security partner seems determined to confirm every negative attitude about the U.S. held by nationalist South Koreans. The Moon government has responded with a flurry of overtures toward the North.</p><p>Together, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are enabling the North Korean nuclear program to evolve into a mighty diplomatic weapon against U.S. interests, separating South Korea from the United States, incentivizing the South to placate the North. Together, Kim and Trump are depriving the U.S. of conventional military options—because there is no non-nuclear option against the North without the support of the South. Between 2015 and 2017, South Korean confidence in the United States to do the right thing in international affairs has <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/03/opinions-in-asian-countries-on-trump-trip/">dropped</a> by a startling 71 points in a Pew survey. Only 17 percent of South Koreans have confidence in Donald Trump—less than half the number that trust China’s Xi Jinping.</p><p>And who is Xi’s best publicist? Why, Donald Trump himself. Trump has often told the world that it is China, not the United States, that has the most leverage over North Korea. He <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/317962835974053888">tweeted</a> in 2013, “North Korea is reliant on China. China could solve this problem easily if they wanted to but they have no respect for our leaders.” And as president too, he has looked to China first and foremost to sway North Korea. He <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/882062572081512449">tweeted</a> in July 2017: “Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!”</p><p>The thought is bound to occur to South Koreans increasingly wary of Trump’s protectionism, unpredictability, and bellicosity: If indeed it is China that can control the North, maybe it is to China not the United States that South Koreans should look for security?</p><p>In a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-first-doesnt-mean-america-alone-1496187426">May 30 op-ed</a>, White House senior advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster sought to assure the world that “America First” does not mean “America alone.” In the Korean peninsula, however, increasingly that’s just what Trump has wrought. Trump’s warlike boasting is steadily leading the United States toward the starkest and most extreme dilemma: The only policies remaining will be a unilateral nuclear strike upon the North—or humbly submitting to a new Chinese-led security order in Northeast Asia. </p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersTrump's Bellicosity Is Ceding America's Influence to China2018-01-03T09:58:52-05:002018-01-03T14:08:54-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-549569The president’s imprudent tweets are convincing the world, and South Korea, that the United States is an unreliable ally.<p>Blue-state taxpayers are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/tax-bill-spawns-new-holiday-ritual-waiting-in-line-to-pay-taxes/2017/12/27/1e7ea59a-eb12-11e7-b698-91d4e35920a3_story.html">hopping mad</a> about the loss of their state and local tax deductions. The latest <em>Wall Street Journal /</em> NBC poll <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-educated-women-are-moving-away-from-gop-1514293200">shows</a> that the voters hit hardest by the GOP tax hikes moving furthest toward the Democrats. While the nation as a whole leans 10 points more Democratic than in 2014, college-educated voters favor Democrats by 16 more points than they did four years ago.</p><p>You can see why those voters are so mad. From their point of view, the tax plan looks like a scheme to shift the cost of government from the truly wealthy onto the merely affluent.</p><p>And you can see, too, the temptation to Democratic opponents. The Republican tax plan is the most nakedly sectional revenue measure the United States has seen since the high-tariff era before the Great Depression. Even before the GOP tax plan, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/?utm_source=feed">state-by-state map</a> of American federalism’s “makers” and “takers” looked like the Trump-Clinton map in reverse, with states like California, New Jersey, and New York the biggest net contributors, and states like Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi the biggest net beneficiaries. The Republican plan loads even more of those costs on blue states: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the federal government will cost taxpayers there almost $670 billion over the next 10 years by limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes and of mortgage interest.</p><p>Those extra funds, squeezed disproportionately from states like California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, just suffice to offset the revenue loss from the GOP’s tax cuts to corporations and pass-through businesses.</p><p>Yet as aggressively sectional as the GOP plan is, once done, blue-state legislators should hesitate to undo it. If the mortgage interest deduction was ever a good idea, that time passed a long while ago. Canada, without the deduction, actually has a <em>higher</em> home ownership rate than the United States, <a href="http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/171025/dq171025c-eng.htm">67.8 percent</a> vs. <a href="https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf">63.7percent</a>. But while the average new home in Canada hovers at about <a href="https://www.pwc.com/ca/en/industries/real-estate/emerging-trends-in-real-estate-2018.html">2,000 square feet</a>, the average new home in the United States is nearing <a href="http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/">2,700 square feet</a>. The deduction is advertised as supporting more homeownership; instead, it subsidizes larger homes. How is that a valid policy goal?</p><p>The deductibility of state and local taxes is better grounded, but not much. The policy traces back to the very first income tax, imposed during the Civil War. Its authors were impelled <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/">more by constitutional</a> than economic concerns. In the modern era, its effects have been dubious. It probably has subsidized blue states to tax and spend more than they otherwise would. Ultra-high state income-tax rates—reaching 13.3 percent in California, 8.82 percent in New York—might trigger more debate, even in those one-party states, if the people paying them felt their full weight. The federal government cushions the pain, especially for those state citizens who might otherwise complain most effectively. (According to the Tax Foundation, <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/">88 percent of the benefit</a> of the deduction flows to taxpayers with incomes over $100,000.) That cushioning, in turn, enables high-tax states to yield to pressure from other local interest groups. One striking example: While the Vera Institute <a href="https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends">calculates</a> that across the nation it costs an average of $31,000 per year to incarcerate a prisoner, California <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prison-costs-20170604-htmlstory.html">spends</a> more than $75,000.</p><p>Rather than restore these deductions, which have subsidized bad policies, especially in the blue states, the right way to redress Republican sectional chauvinism is by addressing the biggest subsidy to the worst policies of the red states—and especially their profligate spewing of greenhouse gases. Just as the blue states have used the mortgage and state-and-local deductions to offload the cost of their generous state governments, so red states have inflicted on others the climate consequences of their lifestyles.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/">map of carbon-intensity by state</a> looks like the map of state and local spending, upside down.</p><p>The top five most carbon-efficient jurisdictions are D.C., New York, California, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The five worst: Wyoming, North Dakota, West Virginia, Alaska, and Louisiana.</p><p>A carbon tax of $15 per ton <a href="http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/introducing-e3-carbon-tax-calculator-estimating-future-co2-emissions-and-revenues">would raise</a> something over $700 billion over the next 10 years. That money would a) very neatly balance the 2017 GOP revenue raid on blue-state tax deductions, b) reduce the current carbon-dioxide emissions trajectory by about 10 perent, and c) reduce by half the GOP plan’s estimated increase in the federal debt. The revenues from the tax would help to avert the impending cutbacks in Medicare and other health programs about which the GOP House leadership is now noisily contemplating.</p><p>It’s often <a href="http://www.nber.org/digest/jan10/w15239.html">complained</a> that carbon taxes are regressive. This objection is true, as far as it goes, but also highly misleading from a policy point of view. Poorer households spend a lot on energy relative to their incomes, but surprisingly little in absolute terms. In 2013—a year of high fuel prices—the bottom fifth of American households spent about $1,160 on gasoline and motor oil. That cost weighed heavily upon them, but it remains a small enough target that it can be offset without too much of a bite out of the tax’s contributions to federal revenues.</p><p>Perhaps the ideal way to do the offset is by cutting the federal payroll tax, another tax that bears most heavily on lower-income earners. The regressivity of this tax goes under-discussed—indeed often unmentioned. When White House press secretary Sarah Sanders <a href="http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/10/30/sarah-sanders-beer-anecdote-trump-tax-plan-explanation-sot.cnn">suggested</a> that the richest tenth of the American population bear 59 percent of the tax burden, she reached her conclusion by ignoring the biggest tax paid by the majority of the population, a tax that contributes one-third of federal revenues—three times as much as the corporate income tax before the Trump tax cuts. Reducing that burden by just a few hundred dollars per household would do more than anything ever urged by Donald Trump to stabilize the finances of poor and working America—and to justify taxing the fuel that drives monster homes and private jets as well as pick-up trucks and commuter buses.</p><p>A century ago, George Washington Plunkitt memorably <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/plunkett-george/tammany-hall/index.htm#s05">described</a> the plunder of New York City by upstate Republican legislators.</p><blockquote>
<p>Did you ever go up to Albany from this city with a delegation that wanted anything from the Legislature? No? Well, don’t. The hayseeds who run all the committees will look at you as if you were a child that didn’t know what it wanted, and will tell you in so many words to go home and be good and the Legislature will give you whatever it thinks is good for you. They put on a sort of patronizing air, as much as to say, “These children are an awful lot of trouble. They’re wantin’ candy all the time, and they know that it will make them sick. They ought to thank goodness that they have us to take care of them.” And if you try to argue with them, they’ll smile in a pityin’ sort of way as if they were humorin’ a spoiled child.</p>
<p>But just let a Republican farmer from Chemung or Wayne or Tioga turn up at the Capital. The Republican Legislature will make a rush for him and ask him what he wants and tell him if he doesn’t see what he wants to ask for it. If he says his taxes are too high, they reply to him: “All right, old man, don’t let that worry you. How much do you want us to take off?”</p>
<p>“I guess about fifty per cent will about do for the present,” says the man. “Can you fix me up?”</p>
<p>“Sure,” the Legislature agrees. “Give us somethin’ harder, don’t be bashful. We’ll take off sixty per cent if you wish. That’s what we’re here for.”</p>
<p>Then the Legislature goes and passes a law increasin’ the liquor tax or some other tax in New York City, takes a half of the proceeds for the State Treasury and cuts down the farmers’ taxes to suit. It’s as easy as rollin’ off a log – when you’ve got a good workin’ majority and no conscience to speak of.</p>
</blockquote><p>The 2017 tax law was written much in that same spirit. The best requital is to reverse that spirit in a way that protects the planet that is home to all Americans, whether they live in blue states or red.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersHow to Fix the GOP Tax Plan2017-12-28T21:01:23-05:002017-12-28T21:01:23-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-549362Instead of rolling it back, why not use a carbon tax to fix its regional tilt and benefit all Americans in the process?<p>Start with the mea culpa: I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/republicans-are-throwing-away-their-shot-at-tax-reform/546317/?utm_source=feed">doubted</a> that the Republican tax bill would cross the finish line.</p><p>I was not such a chump as to take seriously the professed deficit concerns of GOP lawmakers like Senator Bob Corker. What I did anticipate, though, was that the few remaining blue-state House and Senate Republicans would balk at the targeting of their constituents. The Republican tax bill lands like a hammer on upper-income professionals in blue states. Highly compensated attorneys, doctors, accountants, and financial-service professionals will lose tens of thousands of dollars in deductions for their heavy state and local taxes and costly coastal mortgages, without getting much in return. Individuals earning between $200,000 and $500,000 will see most of that income increase from a marginal rate of 33 percent to 35 percent. (Individuals earning more than $500,000, by contrast, will see their marginal rate drop from 39.6 percent to 37 percent.</p><p>The bill is also littered with provisions almost designed to goad professionals. I asked Philip Hackney of Louisiana State University, formerly in the IRS’s general counsel’s office, to detail a few.</p><p>Offered a better job across the country? If your new employer tells you, “Don’t worry—we’ll cover your moving costs,” those payments will now add to your taxable income.</p><p>If your house floods or burns in a routine accident, not a national emergency? That loss is no longer deductible, either.</p><p>There’s even what looks like a special revenge tax upon the National Football League: Pro athletes may no longer deduct their agents’ commissions from their salaries.</p><p>(The deduction for major medical expenses was, however, reinstated by the Senate after a surge of protest. It was even made more generous for the tax plan’s first two years, returning to the 2017 level in 2020.)</p><p>Yet my expectation of blue-state GOP dissent was wrong. The Republican caucus cohered. The GOP has likely traded away the last of its seats in New York, New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and California. What did it get in return?</p><p>At the core of the bill is an important and needed reform: a reduction in the corporate income tax to something like the developed-world norm of 21 percent from the current 35 percent, which had been among the highest rates in the world.</p><p>Such a reform, properly executed, would have cost the Treasury surprisingly little in forgone revenues. While the U.S. taxes corporations at a high rate, the corporate code is so perforated with exemptions that U.S. tax collections from its corporate income tax <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/us-low-tax-country/">fall far <em>below</em></a> the developed-world norm: 2.5 percent of gross domestic product in the U.S. vs. 3.5 percent for the developed world as a whole. Moving from a high-rate, narrow-base corporate tax code to a lower-rate, broader-base code would have rationalized economic decision-making and actually topped up federal revenues.</p><p>Two decisions blocked that happy outcome. The first was a decision against broadening the corporate tax base very widely. The second—even more fateful—was to insert an amazing new tax refuge into the tax system: a super-low tax rate for pass-through businesses.</p><p>Most American businesses do not pay the corporate income tax. They pay through the individual tax system. So long as the corporate rate and the individual rate more or less tracked each other, this fact did not muck things up too much.</p><p>But once the decision was made to lower the corporate rate so substantially, those other businesses faced a heavy tax penalty. What to do? The congressional GOP’s answer: Let them pay at a new radically lower “pass through” rate.</p><p>The implications of the pass-through decision are staggering. Not only is it massively disruptive of federal revenues, but it wildly distorts decision-making throughout the private economy. Adam Looney at the Brookings Institution <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/12/14/how-the-new-tax-bill-encourages-tax-avoidance/">computes</a>:</p><blockquote>
<p>If a plumber makes $60,000 a year as wages paid by an employer, he or she will pay 60 percent more in income taxes than if that plumber had been a sole proprietor or self-employed and takes advantage of the pass-through rate.</p>
</blockquote><p>As of 2014, <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/us-has-more-individually-owned-businesses-corporations/">there were already</a> <em>30 million</em> pass-through businesses in the United States. Under the new incentives, there will instantly appear many millions more. To deal with the ensuing revenue loss, Congress had to squeeze somebody. Upper-income blue-state residents got the chop.</p><p>But wait! What if those upper-income blue-state residents organize themselves as pass-through businesses? Won’t they get the last laugh on their red-state plutocratic persecutors? Not so fast. Congress thought of that. Section 1202(e)(3)(A) of the Internal Revenue Code <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/1202">lists</a> the fields forbidden to take advantage of the new pass-through rate: health, law, accounting, actuarial science, performing arts, business consulting, athletics, brokerage services, financial services, or any other trade or business whose principal asset is the reputation or skill of the business owner.</p><p>The list tracks almost perfectly with the professions with which the Republican Party has most difficulty. (Good news, engineers and architects: You were originally on the prohibited list, but somebody’s effective lobbying got you omitted at the last minute.)</p><p>If the idea behind tax reform is to eliminate favoritism from the tax code, then the tax law of 2017 is anti-reform: an aggressive loading of the costs of the state upon disfavored persons, groups, and regions. It leaves behind an unstable legacy, both economic and political. Economically, the system invites gaming. Politically, it accelerates the exodus of college-educated professionals out of the Republican Party. It will tint the blue states ever bluer, up and down the income scale.</p><p>States like California and New York desperately need a competitive Republican Party—especially at the state level—to challenge the lazy and often corrupt practices of local Democratic machines. This new tax law will have the opposite effect, wrecking whatever little remains of GOP strength in the states that motor American innovation and growth. It threatens to push New Jersey, Colorado, and Virginia into single-party blue rule as well, by painfully demonstrating that the party of Trump is not only obnoxious to their values but implacably hostile to their welfare.</p><p>Perhaps the surge of economic growth promised by the bill’s proponents will salve hurts, change minds, and protect blue-state Republicans. If not, America’s already bitterly polarized two-party system may soon be evolving further and faster into two single-party systems, each bent upon pillaging the other.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersRepublicans Exact Their Revenge Through a Tax Bill2017-12-21T13:43:46-05:002017-12-21T16:28:21-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-549017Instead of eliminating favoritism, the GOP’s reforms load the costs of the state upon disfavored persons, groups, and regions.<p>On Monday morning the conservative-media world woke up to <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454701/jennifer-rubin-trump-obsession-mindless-opponent">a savagely personal attack</a> in <em>National Review</em> on the<em> Washington Post</em> columnist Jennifer Rubin. The outburst might seem a textbook case of the narcissism of petty differences within the conservative world. Both the author of the denunciation, Charles C. W. Cooke, and its target, Rubin, are right-leaning skeptics of Donald Trump. What on earth could they be arguing about? And does it matter?</p><p>I think it does—a lot.</p><p>Cooke criticizes Rubin—a friend of mine, but one with whom I’ve from time to time <a href="http://www.frumforum.com/do-jews-hate-palin/">tussled</a>—for taking her opposition to Trump too far. “If Trump likes something, Rubin doesn’t. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hers—as anyone’s is wont to do from time to time—she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay it. The result is farcical and sad.”</p><p>Thus, in the past Rubin praised Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney when they pledged to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; when President Trump pledged to do it, she was unmoved. Where once she followed the generic conservative line on taxes and guns, she now criticizes Trump for following that same line.</p><p>The core of Cooke’s indictment is this: Rubin’s universal distrust of Trump should be seen as the inverse of the mindless praise for Trump’s vagaries elsewhere in the conservative world.</p><blockquote>
<p>Since the summer of 2015, the many acolytes of ‘MAGA!’ have agreed to subordinate their true views to whatever expediency is required to sustain Donald Trump’s ego. Out has gone their judgment, and in has come their fealty; where once there were thriving minds, now there are just frayed red hats. During the same period, Jennifer Rubin has done much the same thing.</p>
</blockquote><p>What should Rubin do instead? She should, Cooke insinuates, follow the high example he set himself. Although Cooke spoke fiercely of Donald Trump before the election, he has since mostly avoided the uncongenial subject. Where news is too ominous to be ignored—the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, the accumulating evidence of collusion with Russia—Cooke has urged conservatives to withhold judgment. They <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447480/comey-divide">should be</a> “skeptical but not hysterical” about the firing of Comey. In the Russia matter, conservatives <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447480/comey-divide">should bide their time</a> and keep their mouths shut. “If you aren’t sure that there is a big scandal looming, you’re likely to be circumspect and happy to watch it play out as a process.”</p><p>Above all, every day should be treated as a blank slate, an opportunity for the truly independently minded to bestow a tip of the hat or wag of a finger. As Cooke <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443040/never-trump-conservatives-donald-trumps-election-hasnt-silenced-criticism">wrote</a> in December 2016:</p><blockquote>
<p>Now that the election is over, I am going to treat Donald Trump as I would any other political figure: skeptically, fairly, and with the presumption that men are not angels. To the bottom of my boots, I hope that Trump will overcome his many flaws and do a competent and honorable job. If he doesn’t, I shall say so. If he does, I shall admit it.</p>
</blockquote><p>Rubin’s crime is that rather than waking up every morning fresh for each day’s calling of balls and strikes, she carries into her work the memory of the day before. She sees patterns where Cooke sees only incidents. She speaks out even when Cooke deems it prudent to hold his tongue.</p><p>In this course, Cooke is following the Republican leadership in the House and Senate and the more presentable of the conservative commentariat: <em>Hope for the best. Make excuses where you can. </em><em>When you can’t make an excuse, keep as quiet as you can. </em><em>Attack Trump’s critics in the media and Hollywood when all else fails. </em>That has also become the working position of many conservatives who in 2015 and 2016 called themselves “Never Trump.”</p><p>In the spring of 2016, <em>National Review</em> published its <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-menace">“Against Trump” issue.</a> Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency, most visibly the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell and the National Rifle Association’s Dana Loesch.</p><p>As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.</p><p>The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson. With reason. The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the <em>National Review</em> special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had <a href="https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/erick-erickson/moving-on-gIe11aqczUC7zIECvLzi8w">lost</a> his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.</p><blockquote>
<p>It is half of my family's income and is needed. But I also, if I am being honest, was largely being paid without working. I am a firm believer that if one is to be paid there should be work, but it has been harder and harder to put me in the appropriate contributor box. I am neither anti-Trump nor pro-Trump, but a conservative who does not think he is, but thinks he is advancing some things commendably. All news shows on all networks tend to favor a straight R v. D panel and I'm not in those boxes anymore.</p>
</blockquote><p>But it’s not merely cable news that insists on those boxes. So does the conservative think-tank world. So does the conservative public-speaking circuit. So do the passengers on <em>National Review</em>’s lucrative cruises. After one such cruise, back in the spring of 2016, one <em>National Review</em> editor, Jonah Goldberg, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435686/donald-trump-republican-nomination-i-still-wont-vote-him">wrote</a> about the pressure exerted even then by conservative audiences upon conservative writers.</p><blockquote>
<p>NR Cruises are special things. They are filled with friends of <em>National Review</em>, often lifelong friends. No one who hates the magazine plunks down that much hard-earned money to spend a week drinking, eating, and touring with its writers and editors (and other passengers who are fans of the magazine). As a result, nearly all disagreements are like family disagreements. And so it was an interesting focus group, a kind of microcosm of what is happening across the conservative movement. There were some true Trumpers and anti-Trumpers, but there were many more people who simply think supporting Trump is making the best of a bad situation. I understand that position and I have sympathy for it.</p>
</blockquote><p> So much so, in fact, that:</p><blockquote>
<p>During a panel Q&amp;A, a passenger on the cruise made a strong case for voting Trump. He ably argued that we know Hillary will be terrible, while we can only suspect Trump will be. Trump will probably do some things conservatives will like—Supreme Court appointments, etc.—while we know for a fact Hillary will not. And here’s what I said: I agree. If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump for precisely these reasons.</p>
</blockquote><p>Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud">quantified</a> how dramatically far-right media sources such as <em>Breitbart News</em> have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as <em>National Review</em>. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:</p><blockquote>
<p>The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.</p>
</blockquote><p>Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the <em>National Review</em> 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz. You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the <em>New York Post</em>’s editorial page; veteran broadcaster Charles Sykes. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV. There are more, and I do not mean to slight anyone by omission. Others would wish to stand there if they economically could.</p><p>But if Cooke fears that very many conservatives are at risk of following the Rubin trail to consistent anti-Trumpism, I can set his mind at ease. The vast majority of those in the conservative world who do not admire Trump—and who cannot safely divert their feelings into anti-anti-Trump fulminations against the detested liberal media—are carefully treading his own prudent path, not Rubin’s hazardous one.</p><p>As the scandals about Trump worsen, pressures on right-of-center people to conform will only tighten.</p><p>It’s a paradox, but it’s true: Trump gains a huge measure of support within the conservative world precisely because of how guilty he looks. Trump supporters may insist, “There’s no there, there.” They sense—as we all sense—that in fact so <em>many </em>“there”s lurk beneath Trump’s White House that even the most maladroit digger is liable to find something terrible: If not collusion with Russia, then perhaps tax evasion. If not tax evasion, then maybe bank fraud. If not bank fraud, then sexual assault. Or all of them.</p><p>Luminaries of the conservative academic world—including a fellow at the august Hoover Institution—are now <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-and-robert-mueller-imperil-the-rule-of-law-1508798756">repeating</a> Sean Hannity–style character assassination of James Comey and Special Counsel Robert Mueller:</p><blockquote>
<p>Mr. Mueller’s ever-widening scrutiny of the Trump campaign exhibit a tenacious and nearly unconstrained search for persons and crimes to prosecute. In contrast, Mr. Comey’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton reflects a determination not to prosecute systematic and obvious unlawful conduct.</p>
<p>Both excesses threaten the rule of law—but the dogged search for persons and crimes to prosecute poses the graver threat to constitutional government.</p>
</blockquote><p>That appeared in the formerly Trump-skeptical <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, now the message board for the vociferous “shut down the Russia investigation” crowd. <em>The Journal</em>’s Washington columnist Kimberley Strassel <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/obstruction-of-congress-1512691791">wrote</a> on December 7, 2017:</p><blockquote>
<p>Some want Attorney General Jeff Sessions to clean house, although this would require firing a huge number of career Justice Department lawyers. Some want Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller—which would be counterproductive. Some have called for a special counsel to investigate the special counsel, but that way lies infinite regress.</p>
<p>There is a better, more transparent way. Mr. Sessions (or maybe even Mr. Trump) is within rights to create a short-term position for an official whose only job is to ensure Justice Department and FBI compliance with congressional oversight. This person needs to be a straight shooter and versed in law enforcement, but with no history at or substantial ties to the Justice Department or FBI.</p>
</blockquote><p>The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.</p><p>Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol <a href="https://twitter.com/billkristol/status/933074207637991424">quipped</a> on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”</p><p>Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses. Cooke touts these alterations as deviations from principle. But really this is a game that can be played by anyone who has access to Google. For example, the same Cooke who produced a sharply personal attack on Rubin in 2017 <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/407728">condemned,</a> back in 2014, “partisan post-rationalization, decorated with insecure-albeit-amusing ad hominem attacks.” We all change our minds, apparently.</p><p>Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.</p><p>The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for <em>why</em> he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”</p><p>This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?</p><p>You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite the flux of their adherents. In this view, millions of American conservatives may build their political identities on enthusiastic support for Donald Trump, but American conservatism will continue humming in the background as if none of those human commitments mattered at all.</p><p>This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.</p><p>Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.</p><p>The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. Donald Trump may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative. The word <em>conservative</em> will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / ReutersConservatism Can't Survive Donald Trump Intact2017-12-19T09:58:37-05:002017-12-19T17:04:46-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-548738As reflexive support for the president redefines their movement, most conservative commentators have caved to pressure, following along.<p>The Trump administration unveils a National Security Strategy next week, but National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster provided an advance glimpse of the plan on Tuesday.</p><p>A helpful way to understand where this still-new administration is leading is to compare McMaster’s bullet-pointed speech to the final strategy documents released by two previous administrations, in <a href="http://nssarchive.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015.pdf">2015</a> and <a href="http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/2006.pdf">2006</a>, and note what is changing. McMaster spoke at a Washington conference hosted by Policy Exchange, a U.K. think tank that I chaired from 2014 until earlier this year. Granted, his short speech inevitably abridged the long-form document. Yet even allowing for that, the differences can be seen.</p><p>The Obama administration’s 2015 document addressed in some detail epidemics and climate change. The Bush administration committed the United States to supporting human dignity, opening societies, and supporting the building of democracy. The main lines of the Trump approach jettison these concerns. If McMaster fairly summarized the new approach, the United States will soon formally commit itself to a lonelier and less generous course.</p><p>The new Trump policy is headed by four priorities: defending the homeland, protecting American prosperity, sustaining peace through strength, and advancing American influence. All these themes were present in 2006 and 2015 too, but the differences in emphasis in 2017 are crucial. The two previous presidencies spoke of American economic interests as both <em>shared</em> and <em>expanding</em>. The Trump approach is narrower and gloomier: American prosperity is to be protected, not enlarged; foreign economies are seen as rivals, not partners. McMaster spoke of fighting back against currency manipulation and unfair trade. Which is important as far as it goes—and indeed such themes have been struck before. But what is missing this time, if the advance summary is indicative, is awareness of the American economy as integrated into a global system, giving the U.S. an interest in the health of the whole.</p><p>“The American consumer cannot sustain global demand—growth must be more balanced,” cautioned the Obama report of 2015. “U.S. markets and educational opportunities will help the next generation of global entrepreneurs sustain momentum in growing a global middle class.” The Bush administration wrote in 2006: “The United States promotes the enduring vision of a global economy that welcomes all participants and encourages the voluntary exchange of goods and services based on mutual benefit, not favoritism.”</p><p>McMaster’s speech nodded to the reduction of poverty worldwide over the past two decades. But there was no sense that this transformation represented a crucial and positive change in the strategic environment, one offering opportunities for Americans as well as risks. America under the leadership of Donald Trump seems much more intent on preserving the legacy of the past than building with others the possibilities of the future.</p><p>Within the Trump administration, McMaster has been a leading—if not always successful—champion of alliances and allies. He did his utmost to coax and cajole Donald Trump to endorse NATO’s mutual defense Article V during Trump’s visit to NATO headquarters in June. (To the dismay and surprise of McMaster and other top aides, Trump spontaneously <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/05/trump-nato-speech-national-security-team-215227">omitted</a> the key passage of the speech.) The very fact that McMaster chose to unveil the strategy at a joint event with his U.K. counterpart, Mark Sedwill, symbolizes his own commitment to internationalism. The United States, he said, drew strength from coalitions with other strong and independent nation-states—although that last comment may also have been an expression of the Trump administration’s unconcealed dislike for the European Union.</p><p>And yet, every salute was joined to a scold. McMaster insisted more than once upon “cooperation with reciprocity”—a phrase seemingly intended to signal a new approach and emphasis. Where once the U.S. perceived itself as the single largest beneficiary of the rules-based international order undergirded by American power, Team Trump seems to be absorbing the president’s perception of the United States as an imposed-upon dupe. In his Roy Moore endorsement speech in Pensacola, Florida, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/939882434828451840">repeated</a> his tweeted demands that U.S. allies pay cash in return for American protection. It’s unlikely that the demand will be so crudely stated in an NSC document—but the grievance has been absorbed and has impressed itself on U.S. policy.</p><p>Most startling is the repudiation of a values component to U.S. foreign policy. Here of course the Trump foreign-policy vision faces an insuperable problem: The single most daunting problem for American soft power and global influence is the president himself. Trump is <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/">almost unanimously</a> reviled within America’s democratic allies. Confidence not only in him personally, but in American leadership generally, has starkly collapsed. Only 29 percent of Australians, 24 percent of Japanese, 22 percent of Canadians and British, 14 percent of the French, and 11 percent of Germans trust Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. In South Korea, he is trusted only by 17 percent—even as Trump tries to build a coalition against North Korea that will crucially depend on South Korean support. (Periodically <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/02/trump-plans-withdrawal-from-south-korea-trade-deal/?utm_term=.6d59fef7a8c6">threatening</a> trade war against South Korea surely does not help.)</p><p>Worryingly, McMaster cited Trump’s Warsaw speech as an example of how this administration would extend its influence. The most immediate effect of that speech was to empower Poland’s increasingly authoritarian government to proceed with an attack on freedom of the press and independence of the judiciary. As Anne Applebaum <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/its-now-clear-the-most-dangerous-threats-to-the-west-are-not-external/2017/07/16/2475e704-68a6-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html?utm_term=.cb33eff10912">wrote</a> in <em>The Washington Post</em> on July 16:</p><blockquote>
<p>Last week, only days after Trump’s visit, [Poland’s Law and Justice party] passed a bill that will politicize the National Council of the Judiciary, the constitutional body that selects judges. Then it went further: Without public hearings, it introduced <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/pis-polands-point-of-no-return/?utm_content=buffer21cc9&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer">another bill</a> that, if signed into law, would enable the justice minister, in breach of the constitution, to dismiss—immediately—all of the members of Poland’s highest court.</p>
</blockquote><p>Those plans were eventually beaten back by the largest public protests in Poland since Solidarity days—but no thanks to Trump. “The United States’s message has encouraged Law and Justice to isolate itself in Europe, safe in its belief that America has its back.”</p><p>Trump’s defense of Western values in Poland was not a defense of democracy or liberty, but an eruption of chauvinist boasting about the merits of European culture as compared to that of unnamed but inferior others.</p><blockquote>
<p>We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.</p>
<p>We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.</p>
<p>And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.</p>
<p>What we have, what we inherited from our—and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people—what we've inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. </p>
</blockquote><p>This is not language to win friends and influence people even inside Europe, much less the rest of the world. The day may come when the United States needs cooperation from partners without a symphonic tradition and who do not share ancestors with Donald Trump. The day may even possibly come when the U.S. needs cooperation from partners who do not agree that the country that elected Trump as its president strives for excellence and rewards brilliance quite so much as it boasts it does.</p><p>This problem is inherent and inescapable. It will demand tact and ingenuity to resolve. Apparently, based on the words read today by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dereliction-Duty-Johnson-McNamara-Vietnam/dp/0060929081">one of the most formidable soldier-intellectuals</a> of recent times, the national-security strategy of the United States is to pretend that the problem does not exist at all.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / Reuters A National-Security Strategy Devoid of Values2017-12-12T16:38:45-05:002017-12-13T10:42:46-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-548219H.R. McMaster previewed the administration’s new plan on Tuesday, which offers a striking contrast to the visions of other recent presidents.<p>You ought to read Isaac Chotiner’s <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/12/an_interview_with_alan_dershowitz_on_trump_and_the_mueller_investigation.html">interview in <em>Slate</em></a> with Alan Dershowitz, the famous lawyer turned Trump defender. As it becomes ever more unsustainable to maintain the president’s innocence, more Trump supporters will fall back on Dershowitz’s theory that the president cannot be held to account—especially now that Dershowitz’s arguments have been <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/937661677700550656">endorsed</a> by President Trump himself.</p><p>In the Chotiner interview, Dershowitz makes his case at greater length than cable television allows. It’s worth hearing and weighing his argument in order to appreciate how very wrong it is—and must be:</p><blockquote>
<p>Of course the president can obstruct justice. Nixon obstructed justice. President Clinton was charged with obstructing justice. A president can’t obstruct justice by simply exercising his constitutional authority. That is: A president can’t obstruct justice by pardoning. A president can’t obstruct justice by firing somebody he’s authorized to fire. If a president bribes or takes a bribe, or if a president, as Nixon did, pays hush money, or tells his subordinates to lie to the FBI, or destroys evidence, of course he can be charged with obstruction of justice, but he can’t be charged with obstruction of justice simply by exercising his constitutional authority.</p>
</blockquote><p>I’ll put the follow-up question more rudely than Chotiner, in order to set up Dershowitz’s amazing answer. What if he’s exercising that authority to thwart the investigation of a crime in which he might be implicated? What if the president appears on television and boasts to the world afterward?</p><p>Dershowitz contends none of that matters. So long as what the president is doing is allowed to him by Article II, his reasons—even his confessed reasons—do not matter.</p><blockquote>
<p>It would be a violation of the separation of powers and the Constitution to charge a president with obstruction of justice for simply doing no more than exercising his constitutional authority regardless of what his motive is.</p>
</blockquote><p>Let’s test that proposition.</p><p>Look back again at Dershowitz’s short list of things the president might do that <em>could</em> trigger an obstruction charge. The president, Dershowitz says, cannot destroy evidence. But wait: The very first sentence of Article II lodges in the president the “executive power of the United States.” One of those powers is the management and custody of presidential records. The 1978 Public Records Act seeks to limit that power by <a href="https://www.archives.gov/about/laws/presidential-records.html">requiring</a> the consent of the archivist of the United States to the destruction of records, in much the same way that the president’s power to initiate and halt criminal prosecutions is limited by the laws and rules governing the Department of Justice and the FBI.</p><p>Like the FBI director, the archivist has been expected to be above politics. But also like the FBI director, the archivist can be fired by the president.</p><p>Suppose Trump asked the current archivist of the United States—appointed by President Obama in 2009—to destroy certain records, as he asked James Comey not to investigate Michael Flynn. Suppose the archivist refused, as Comey refused. Suppose Trump then fired the archivist, as he fired Comey. Suppose Trump then told a television interviewer that he fired the archivist precisely because the archivist refused to destroy documents that might incriminate him—as he told Lester Holt that he fired Comey to shut down the Russia investigation.</p><p>If firing the FBI director to stop a prosecution falls within the president’s Article II powers, so then does firing the archivist to compel the destruction of documents. How then can Dershowitz insist that the president may not destroy evidence? By Dershowitz’s own reasoning, the president certainly can.</p><p>Indeed, under Dershowitz’s reasoning, the president can do a lot more than that! Imagine that a president has committed a wrongful act, one that could expose him to impeachment or other penalty. Imagine that there is one eyewitness to the wrongful acts, a military officer. In order to silence him, the president orders the officer into an action certain to lead to the officer’s death. Under Article II, the president is commander in chief of the armed forces. Can he then order military actions with the intent to eliminate inconvenient witnesses?</p><p>The Dershowitz answer would be “Yes.” And by his reasoning, his answer must remain on yes even after the president confessed to the whole business on television.</p><p>And that answer … is nuts, isn’t it?</p><p>Before the president can be prosecuted for obstruction, he—most lawyers seem to agree—must first be impeached and removed from office. But the fact that an obstruction trial cannot begin so long as the president holds his or her office does not mean that no president can ever obstruct at all. Yet this is the argument Americans are now being invited to believe.</p><p>The Trump presidency is leading this country in directions utterly inconsistent with any concept of the rule of law. But it is not only Donald Trump personally and individually who is doing the leading. Around and often ahead of him are many others, in politics and media, who empower him by breaking long established institutions and norms of government. Whether Dershowitz’s anti-constitutional stance is motivated by his support for Trump, lingering rage at Obama, or sheer contrarianism is immaterial. This is a case where motive does not matter. Only the results do. And they become more dangerous by the day.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersTrump Isn't Above the Law2017-12-05T08:32:06-05:002017-12-05T09:32:14-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547499Trump’s defenders claim the nation’s chief executive can’t obstruct justice by exercising his constitutional authority, but haven’t considered the implications.<p>On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-remarks-announcing-new-tools-combat-opioid-crisis">announced </a>the Trump administration’s latest actions to combat the surge of deaths from opioid addiction.</p><p>They did not add up to big news. An additional $12 million in grants to local law enforcement. An internal restructuring of the Drug Enforcement Agency. An order to the 93 U.S. attorneys to designate one staff member as their office’s opioid coordinator.</p><p>The script for the otherwise ho-hum event contained praise for President Trump’s leadership and a thank-you to the senior-most White House aide in attendance. “I want to thank Kellyanne Conway for being here today. The president has made this a top priority for his administration—including every senior official and cabinet member—as her presence here today can attest.”</p><p>No news there either. Until Sessions decided to insert an apparently on-the-spot improvisation of his own. Trump, Sessions <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/kellyanne-conway-is-opioids-czar">said</a> off-the-cuff, had detailed Conway “to coordinate and lead the [anti-opioid] effort from the White House.”</p><p>Those words did make news. “Trump’s Counselor Kellyanne Conway is now Leading His Opioids Strategy,” headlined Buzzfeed at 5:19 p.m. Other media sources quickly followed: “Conway will oversee opioid epidemic response, Sessions said,” <a href="https://www.axios.com/conway-appointed-to-oversee-opioid-epidemic-2513627442.html">wrote</a> Axios. “Kellyanne Conway is now America’s Opioid Czar,” <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/kellyanne-conway-is-now-americas-opioid-czar.html">announced</a> <em>New York</em>. “Kellyanne Conway chosen as Trump’s ‘opioids czar,” <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/kellyanne-conway-chosen-as-trumps-opioid-czar/article/2642091">blared</a> the <em>The Washington Examiner</em>. “Three Things We Know About How Kellyanne Conway Will Handle Being Opioid Czar,” <a href="https://qz.com/1142241/kellyanne-conway-is-the-new-us-opioid-czar/">offered</a> <em>Quartz</em>.</p><p><em>The Washington Post</em>, more cautiously, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-announces-grants-and-a-new-dea-office-to-combat-opioids/2017/11/29/0614fccc-d512-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html">omitted</a> Conway from its headline about the event, but did write in the body of the story: “Kellyanne Conway, one of President Trump’s top advisers, has been tasked with overseeing White House initiatives to combat opioid abuse, Sessions said. She attended the announcement Wednesday, standing off to the side.”</p><p>On Thursday, <em>The Daily Caller </em><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/30/no-kellyanne-conway-is-not-the-opioid-czar/">reported</a> that Conway had told them there is no czar, and that Sessions had been referring to her informal role as the White House’s point person on the crisis.</p><p>It would not be a crazy thing for the White House to task an official to coordinate work on the opioid crisis. The tragic surge of fatalities raises issues that cross departmental lines: law enforcement, mental health, Medicaid administration, prescription-drug regulation, and international relations. The harrowing problem also requires close cooperation between the federal government and the states.</p><p>Complex portfolios like that have been managed by special offices within the Executive Office of the President since the 1930s. The people who head these offices have been nicknamed “czars” since the early 1970s, when President Nixon tasked former Colorado Governor John Love to run the White House office on energy policy. Under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, there have been also been “drug czars,” “inflation czars,” and “AIDS czars” among many, many others.</p><p>In the past, these czars have been selected for one of two principal reasons: outstanding knowledge of the underlying policy issues or shrewd understanding of the bureaucratic processes of government. President Obama’s <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/12/22/introducing-new-cybersecurity-coordinator">first cybersecurity coordinator</a>, Howard Schmidt, had worked for 40 years in the field of information security. He had previously served as chief of information security at Microsoft. He chaired the critical infrastructure protection board for President George W. Bush. Nixon’s drug czar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, may have lacked such specialized understanding of narcotics enforcement—but no student of government has ever better understood how bureaucracies function or fail to function.</p><p>Kellyanne Conway is neither of those things, obviously enough. A pollster before she joined the Trump campaign, she has emerged there as its <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/13/politics/kellyanne-conway-liar-donald-trump/index.html">most brazen and shameless</a> cable-TV talker.</p><p>It’s very difficult to imagine what relevant assets Conway could bring to the opioid czar job, even if it existed.</p><p>Despite Glenn Beck’s <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/29391/">ominous warnings</a> back in the Obama days, when he darkly depicted Obama’s “czars” as lawless all-powerful gauleiters, what matters is the office, not the head. No czarship, no czar.</p><p>There is no opioid office within the White House for Conway to head. There is an Office of National Drug Control Policy. Trump has not appointed a director. His first nominee, former Representative Tom Marino, withdrew on October 27 after <em>The Washington Post</em> and <em>60 Minutes</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/dea-drug-industry-congress/?utm_term=.c238a2e0e7e5">publicized</a> his long career in Congress of working to cripple DEA enforcement against narcotics distributors. The office remains headless all these weeks later, despite Trump’s language of “national emergency.”</p><p>The Trump administration has no opioid policy, beyond just continuing to arrest people who violate the (lax) existing drug laws. Throughout, Trump has treated the opioid tragedy as a messaging challenge, not a real-world disaster that calls for a real-world response: pretend to care while doing nothing, because the administration lacks the competence and capacity to do something. The idea that it would seek to appoint as head of the Office of National Drug Control the single member of the House of Representatives who did most to worsen the opioid crisis had a beautiful fitness to it.</p><p>So maybe after all Kellyanne Conway <em>would be</em> the right person for the “opioid czar” job. Trump’s concern for opioids is a cruelly deceptive fiction. And who propagates cruelly deceptive fictions more persistently and brazenly than Conway?</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedMike Segar / ReutersThe Phantom Czar2017-11-30T12:33:19-05:002017-11-30T13:36:59-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547178Having Kellyanne Conway, a pollster, take point on the fight against opioids reveals a great deal about the seriousness of the White House’s effort.<p>Days before the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. Department of Justice released its <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1012896/download">complaint</a> against the proposed AT&amp;T–Time Warner merger. The complaint is a history-making document. It announces a return to long-discarded approaches to antitrust, and argues that these old ways have regained relevance in the digital era.</p><p>The Justice Department’s arguments for this rediscovery are sophisticated and even compelling—so much so that they raise a retrospective question: If <em>this</em> big merger of content creators and content carriers is banned as anticompetitive, why was the <em>previous</em> big merger of Comcast and NBC Universal permitted? The issues raised by AT&amp;T–Time Warner were also presented by Comcast–NBC. What has changed between then and now?</p><p>The morning after Thanksgiving, however, President Trump tweeted his latest and most outrageous attack yet on CNN, a unit of Time Warner.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">.<a href="https://twitter.com/FoxNews?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FoxNews</a> is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!</p>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/934551607596986368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 25, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>These are ominous words. Inside the U.S., CNN’s reporting is protected by the First Amendment and the courts. Outside of the country, U.S.-affiliated journalists do ultimately depend on the protection of the U.S. government. Trump’s tweet is a direct attack on those international journalists’ freedom and even safety. Trump is inviting rogue regimes and other bad actors all over the world to harass CNN journalists—or worse. Trump’s words inspired this lament from General Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">If this is who we are or who we are becoming, I have wasted 40 years of my life. Until now it was not possible for me to conceive of an American President capable of such an outrageous assault on truth, a free press or the first amendment.</p>
— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) <a href="https://twitter.com/GenMhayden/status/934640869562515457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 26, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Trump’s animus against CNN raises a searching and troubling question. What if the Department of Justice is doing the right thing for the wrong reason? Or what if the president’s personal determination to silence a crucial media institution—or, worse, to force its sale to an ally like Rupert Murdoch—explains the sudden pivot in the department’s antitrust philosophy?</p><p>From the 1930s through the 1980s, antitrust lawyers worried a lot about vertical integration: companies that owned every step of production, from mine to showroom. In 1948, the Department of Justice won a case forcing the major movie producers to sell their chains of movie theaters.</p><p>The Supreme Court’s decision in <em>U.S. v. Paramount Pictures</em> incidentally destabilized the careers of many B-movie actors who had until then enjoyed steady, predictable salaries under the old studio system. The shock jolted one of those actors, Ronald Reagan, from his former New Deal liberalism to burning rage against an over-intrusive federal government.</p><p>Indeed, the old concern with vertical integration did become progressively more intrusive. In the 1960s, makers of car radios brought <a href="https://openjurist.org/390/f2d/113/automatic-radio-mfg-co-v-ford-motor-company">a spate of lawsuits</a> to stop carmakers from selling cars with radios preinstalled. Could <a href="https://openjurist.org/603/f2d/263/berkey-photo-inc-v-eastman-kodak-company">cameras be sold with film?</a> Insulin <a href="https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Medtronic.pdf">together with the infusion apparatus?</a> How could an economy innovate if every product upgrade required government approval? Just think of how much of the office equipment of the 1980s—calendar, camera, calculator, dictionary—comes bundled in a modern phone!</p><p>When Reagan reached the presidency, in 1981, he oversaw the reinvention of antitrust law. The new thinking on antitrust—most powerfully expressed in Robert Bork’s 1978 book, <em>The Antitrust Paradox</em>—denounced the old concern with vertical integration. The Justice Department, Bork argued, should zealously police mergers between companies that competed directly against one another: horizontal competition, in the argot. What happened up and down the product chain should be left to Mr. Market to decide. The Comcast–NBC deal was approved by that logic.</p><p>Unnervingly, however, the uses of market power that we confront in the 2010s look a lot more like the old motion-picture studios trying to control every inch of film content in their theaters than like car-radio makers trying to force consumers to buy two products at a higher price instead of one convenient bundle of car and radio at a lower price. Facebook seeks to seize for itself all of the value created by its users. Companies such as Comcast hope to use control of the content consumers want to extract purchases of content that consumers want less. Time Warner, the DOJ fears, hopes to extend this grasp to the emerging mobile world: maintaining the high profits of the old cable industry even as Americans sever cable’s physical cords.</p><p>As social media emerge as the nation’s, and the world’s, true public square, hard questions arise about their owners claims to be mere platforms. Does Facebook really have no duty to police advertisers who request, “No blacks, please?” Can Twitter stand aside as its platform is used for harassment and threats?</p><p>The deregulated, postindustrial world of the 1980s and ’90s seemed to banish old fears of industrial concentration. The world of Google, Facebook, and Amazon looks a lot more like the world dominated by U.S. Steel and General Motors. Suddenly, formerly antique antitrust ideas again seem relevant to our time.</p><p>Only … is that really what’s going on?</p><p>From <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/media/jeffrey-zucker-cnn-trump.html?auth=login-email"><em>The New York Times</em>,</a> July 5, 2017:</p><blockquote>
<p>White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&amp;T. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.</p>
</blockquote><p>On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly denounced the merger, as he also attacked Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, owner of <em>The Washington Post</em>. Bruised by <em>The Post</em>’s reporting, Trump <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/13/trump-says-washington-post-owner-bezos-has-huge-antitrust-problem.htm">delivered this threat</a> to Sean Hannity in May 2016: “[Bezos] thinks I’ll go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. He’s using <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em>, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust.”</p><p>Strikingly, Trump had little to say about anticompetitive trends elsewhere in the economy. The banking industry underwent a huge consolidation during and after the financial crisis. The share of deposits held by the top 10 banks jumped from 30 percent in 2000 to 46 percent in 2010. The top 10 held 36 percent of loans in 2000, but 50 percent in 2010. The overwhelming majority of that concentration is explained by mergers: an <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2012/201251/201251pap.pdf">average of 150 a year</a> over that decade.</p><p>Monopolization even in the information economy does not interest him so long as the monopolizers refrain from reporting on him in ways he does not like. Trump has had nothing negative to say about Facebook or Google. He reserved his antitrust energy exclusively for companies connected to <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em> and CNN. That’s fishy.</p><p>Likewise it’s fishy that the assistant attorney general for antitrust who filed the objection to the AT&amp;T–Time Warner merger <a href="http://www.bnn.ca/video/no-big-worries-in-at-t-deal-for-time-warner~978794">saw</a> “no problem” with it in a television interview before he joined the Trump administration. Something changed his mind after he took office.</p><p>The most sinister explanation of the change is that Trump’s anti-CNN animus inspired the DOJ’s intervention.</p><p>But here’s a second explanation, rather less sinister but in its way just as disturbing. The career Justice Department staff wanted to move against the AT&amp;T–TimeWarner merger because of reviving concerns about vertical integration and market power in the Facebook-Google-Amazon era. Their wish may well have been blocked under a more normal Republican president with more conventionally conservative, Bork-influenced views of antitrust. Trump’s determination to strike at CNN, however, opened an opportunity for a more aggressive approach. In other words, we could be looking at a federal-enforcement action that is simultaneously credible in its substance—and also enabled by malicious motives.</p><p>In the litigation over the Trump travel ban, courts cited Trump’s tweets as evidence that he had exceeded his proper powers. Historically, presidents have wielded large discretionary power over the entry of aliens into the United States. They can exclude any category or subcategory of aliens for any reason. In one case, the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1402_e29g.pdf">upheld</a> an exclusion of an alien even when the executive offered <em>no reason at all.</em> But Trump’s tweets avowed a deliberate intention to exclude people on the basis of religion. He had demanded a “Muslim ban” during the campaign and he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/934131805409697792">reiterated</a> his “ban” terminology as recently as November 24. Confronted with this repeated actual notice of discriminatory intent, the courts reacted by imposing new limits on long-established powers of the presidency. </p><p>What will they do as the Time Warner litigation moves forward—and the president’s virulent comments are entered into evidence? Otherwise, legal governmental actions can be tainted as illegal and unconstitutional if done for improper reasons.</p><p>Donald Trump is a president with a unique lack of respect for constitutional rights, the rule of law, and the independence of news media. That disrespect shadows every measure of his administration—and haunts the debate we need to have about rethinking antitrust in this age of digital monopoly power.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedMike Blake / ReutersTrump's Sinister Attacks on CNN2017-11-27T08:06:55-05:002017-11-27T10:09:12-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-546755There are very good reasons to block the deal between AT&T and Time Warner—but the president is busily forfeiting the benefit of the doubt.<p>Never has the United States elected a more accomplished man to the presidency than Herbert Clark Hoover, whose organizational genius saved millions of lives from famine and destitution. Never has the ensuing presidency been marked by worse disasters.</p><p>That paradox has energized every biographer of Hoover, from William Leuchtenberg’s brilliant <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Herbert-Hoover-Presidents-President-1929-1933/dp/0805069585">brief study</a> to the massive <a href="https://www.amazon.com/001-Herbert-Hoover-Engineer-1874-1914/dp/039301634X">six-volume collective effort</a> headed by George Nash (which I must confess from the start to having “read in,” but never to have actually “read”).</p><p>The paradox again energizes <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/210289/hoover-by-kenneth-whyte/9780307597960/">the latest of the biographies</a>, by Kenneth Whyte, released last month. (I should mention here that Whyte was the founding editor of a newspaper to which I contributed a column between 1998 and 2013.)</p><p>The central question in assessing a new contribution to Hoover studies is to ask, “What new contribution does it offer to resolving the Hoover paradox?”</p><p>Or perhaps I should say paradoxes, for there is more than one. Here’s the first:</p><p>Almost as soon as he entered office, Hoover was presented with the severest economic crisis of modern times, the Great Depression. The U.S. economy slipped into reverse in August 1929, not even five months after Hoover took office. Counter to later partisan mythmaking, Hoover did not passively submit to the crisis. He worked tirelessly and creatively to mitigate its pain and reignite economic growth. But his efforts largely failed, and often made things worse. The greatest problem-solver ever to enter the presidency miserably failed to solve the greatest problem ever presented to a president.</p><p>Now the second:</p><p>Few if any Americans have dedicated more of their lives to the service of others than Hoover. A wealthy man by age 40, he turned his back on opportunities to earn more—and dissipated much of what he had gained—to devote himself to humanitarian work. As a private citizen, he organized food relief for German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. He undertook an even more ambitious task of rescue in Russia and Ukraine during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Then, as commerce secretary, he took charge of the response to the devastating flooding of the Mississippi Valley in 1927: floods that drove hundreds of thousands from their homes to temporary camps and left the region in economic shambles.</p><p>It wasn’t just that Hoover did these things well. He invented the idea that these things could be done <em>at all</em>, or at least done on any large scale.</p><p>Yet this hugely compassionate person was also a high-handed authoritarian, morbidly sensitive to criticism. Undemonstrative and withdrawn, the hyperactive Hoover perversely presented an image of indifference to a society that—thanks to the spread of radio—had just for the first time been introduced to the appearance of direct personal contact with its president.</p><p>Kenneth Whyte addresses both these paradoxes with scholarship, insight, and verve—even as he chafes against them. Whyte summons us to see Hoover as a human personality, more than just a walking embodiment of Great Depression studies. Hoover’s personality was the product of origins and early career that Whyte attentively details. Hoover lived for 30 productive years after losing office in 1932, and Whyte does just to those years too. Hoover would be called back into public service by President Truman to rationalize and reshape the U.S. government. The creation of the Department of Defense out of quarreling armed services owes much to Hoover, as does the Office of Management and Budget, a president’s most powerful tool for setting priorities. Hoover’s non-disaster work at the Commerce Department would constitute an honorable career in its own right. From the collection of unemployment statistics to the standardization of sizes for industrial parts, from the encouragement of aviation to the creation of property rights in radio frequencies—even had Hoover quit politics in 1928, he would still have shaped the modern American economy more than any cabinet secretary since Alexander Hamilton.</p><p>But the Great Depression is always there, at the center of the story. It’s critical to Hoover’s place in history—and his legacy to American politics.</p><p>Beneath the opening credits of the 1970s sitcom <em>All in the Family</em>, actors Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton sing a song that includes the lyric, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.” In a big country, almost anything is statistically possible. But as a matter of probability, it’s exceedingly unlikely that a working-class New Yorker born in 1924, Archie Bunker’s biography, would have had anything good to say about Hoover. The political drama of the 1970s was the movement of people like Archie away from their inherited loyalty to Franklin Roosevelt’s party into Richard Nixon’s, Ronald Reagan’s—and now Donald Trump’s.</p><p>To encourage and hasten that movement, the conservative intellectual world of the time condemned Hoover fully as fiercely as any Democratic partisan had ever done. He had signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff. He had raised taxes in 1931. Calvin Coolidge and even the intensely mediocre Warren Harding were championed and rehabilitated. Hoover was blamed for wrecking their prosperous legacy. When Ronald Reagan, always conscious of himself as the great historic bookend to Franklin Roosevelt, ordered a portrait of a precursor for his Cabinet room, he selected Coolidge, not Hoover.</p><p>None of this made intellectual or historical sense. The Republicans of the 1920s had passed—and Warren Harding had signed—a much more burdensome tariff than Smoot-Hawley in 1922. It was the 1922 tariff that barred European exports from the U.S. marketplace. That tariff compelled nations rebuilding themselves from the First World War to obtain dollars by piling peacetime borrowing atop wartime borrowing, rather than by running trade surpluses, as economic theory would recommend. If tariffs caused the Depression, Harding and Coolidge should have shared it.</p><p>Hoover did indeed raise taxes in 1931. He did so because the alternative was to quit the gold standard, as Britain would do in September 1931. Under the gold standard of the time, the United States promised to sell an ounce of gold for $20.67 to anyone who wanted to buy it. In times of budget deficits, more speculators would buy gold—confronting the United States with the risk of running out. The only way to stop such runs on the bank was by raising interest rates and balancing budgets. Hoover’s critics are right that this was precisely the wrong thing to do in 1931. But many of them also passionately championed a gold standard that required the policies they opposed. This was not tenable.</p><p>The conservative attack on Hoover in the 1970s originated not in his actual record, but by an ideological hunt for usable heroes. Since Harding and Coolidge occupied the presidency in sunnier days, they were adopted—even though their policies had much more to do with bringing on the Depression than anything Hoover did. Hoover was assigned the villain’s part, to punish him for his bad timing.</p><p>Yet it’s also true that the embittered post-presidential Hoover self-harmed his own reputation. Hoover commenced his political life as a progressive-leaning Republican. Terms like “progressive”—and, worse, its antonyms like “Old Guard”—artificially impose an order that may have been lacking in real life. But speaking very broadly, progressives like Hoover championed scientific expertise and disliked patronage politics; accepted some increased government regulation of industry; preferred lower tariffs to higher; favored more U.S. involvement to keep the postwar peace rather than less; and were more open to forgiving war reparations and war debts rather than insisting on full payment. Hoover could fuse those attitudes with a very individualist appreciation of the free enterprise system. But—a truly self-made man—Hoover disliked hereditary advantages and endorsed heavier taxation of inheritances. In a different world somehow bypassed by the Great Depression, it’s possible to imagine a Hoover presidency that signed into law some kind of Social Security system—a concept endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt when he ran for president on a progressive line in 1912.</p><p>But the Depression did happen, and Hoover was left against the machinations and defamations of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the last president to be inaugurated in March rather than January. Hoover sought to involve his successor in decision making over the five months between election and inauguration—in particular, in negotiations to resolve the international debt problem and to stop the competitive devaluations by which the major economies sought advantage over one another. Perhaps it was not yet too late to save German democracy.</p><p>Roosevelt refused all cooperation, while simultaneously sabotaging Hoover’s own ability to lead during the interim. Hoover and his wife Lou to the end believed that Roosevelt had intentionally sought to aggravate chaos over the winter to make himself look better in the spring. Via that resentment, Hoover reached more radical politics in his post-presidential years. He urged U.S. isolation from the coming war between Nazi Germany and the European democracies. He hoped for a war between Stalin and Hitler by which each would destroy the other—and half of Europe as well, presumably—without the United States having to involve itself. His economic individualism—hitherto balanced by his social conscience—became more extreme. Whyte calls Hoover “the father of the new conservatism” that was born after World War II, the conservatism of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan, a conservatism that sustained the fight against the New Deal order through a second depression that could easily have proved as destructive as the first. The tribute seems both apt and ironic, given how those same conservatives would eventually defame him as badly as his Rooseveltian rival ever had.</p><p>But everything changes. Whatever else the Trump presidency is doing and has done, it has closed the book on that old “new conservatism.” It’s early to perceive what will succeed it, but it won’t be that. And when the time for succession comes, Hoover’s old party could learn things from his impressive career of public service. Among the great services of Ken Whyte’s elegant, lively, and witty biography is its unceasing reminder of this other Hoover. “If we want this civilization to march forward toward higher economic standards, to moral and spiritual ideals,” Hoover argued in a 1926 speech, “it will march only on the feet of healthy children.” The father of the new conservatism had earlier been also the founding president of the American Child Health Association, the exhorter of state governments to build state health clinics and hospitals for children, like Oregon’s Doernbecher hospital, established that same year.</p><p>Hoover’s astounding accomplishments and generous impulses have been effaced by polemical narratives written to serve polemical political purposes. Such distortions are offenses against historical memory. Yet it would prove an interesting irony if justice is finally done to Herbert Hoover not for historical reasons alone, but also because in the unceasing ideological quarrying of the American past, this great man and execrated president has proven himself useful again. To understand Hoover’s life, career, and his legacy in full, this rich new biography will certainly prove indispensable.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedAPHerbert Hoover Is the Model Republicans Need2017-11-26T06:00:00-05:002017-11-30T12:48:17-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545702The latest biography of the “father of new conservatism” finally conveys the full range of his accomplishments.<p>America badly needs corporate tax reform.</p><p>The United States pretends to tax corporations heavily. But those heavy tax rates are perforated by randomly generous rules such that many tax-efficient firms pay nothing at all, or even receive money back from the U.S. Treasury. The result is heavy unfairness between industries and firms, an unfairness that many economists believe systematically distorts investment decisions. U.S. productivity growth has been sluggish since the Great Recession—and had actually <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/New-insights-into-the-slowdown-in-US-productivity-growth">turned</a> negative by the beginning of 2016.</p><p>At the same time, the corporate share of the federal-tax burden has dwindled over the years and decades. More and more of the cost of government now falls upon the payroll tax, which weighs most heavily on low- and middle-income wage earners. These Americans are suffering stagnating incomes, very probably because of the poor productivity growth of the past half-decade.</p><p>Lowering the corporate rate while tightening collection—with a view to raising more revenue in a more rational way—has been a good government cause since the late 1980s. John Kerry <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4607445/ns/politics/t/kerry-calls-broad-revision-corporate-taxes/#.Wg7ShrbMyb8">campaigned on it</a> during his presidential run, in 2004, as NBC News reported at the time:</p><blockquote>
<p>“Some may be surprised to hear a Democrat calling for lower corporate tax rates,” Kerry told an audience at Wayne State University [in Michigan]. “The fact is, I don’t care about the old debates. I care about getting the job done and creating jobs here in the United States of America.”</p>
</blockquote><p>Now, in 2017, the all-Republican federal government at last has a chance to make progress on this goal. And it is throwing that opportunity away.</p><p>As I write on November 19, it may seem like the GOP tax plans are carrying all before them. A big tax cut has passed the House. A somewhat different plan passed late Thursday night through the Senate Finance Committee. The president is bellowing on Twitter his readiness to sign almost anything that arrives on his desk.</p><p>But what is heading toward him is not the kind of reform that can command broad political support, and thus stand the test of possible electoral defeat in 2018 and 2020. It’s a scandalous expression of upper-class and Sunbelt chauvinism that will melt away within weeks of the next Democratic electoral success. Even if the plan becomes law, as still seems improbable in the face of its terrible poll numbers, what firm would venture a long-term investment based on tax changes so likely unsustainable?</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p>Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s old rule of thumb for bills before the Senate—“They pass 70–30, or they fail”—no longer applies. Seventy-vote majorities no longer exist in this hyperpartisan era. The Affordable Care Act passed with only 60 votes. But the spirit of the rule lingers. By refusing to hold hearings and forestalling Congressional Budget Office scoring, Republicans have moved fast. But they have not convinced the public mind to recycle an antique but still meaningful phrase. They may win a vote. They have not won the argument. What they are doing will not last, and will therefore not deliver any of the promised benefits. Their strategy is the equivalent of a 1980s-style corporate raid, which will yield a hasty and morally dubious windfall for a few insiders while damaging the longer-term economic health of the larger enterprise.</p><p>Corporate tax reform is an argument that conservatives and Republicans could and should win. Among the advanced economies, only France—at 34.41 percent—imposes rates even close to the statutory U.S. rate, which including state-level taxes <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-the-world-2017/">averages</a> 38.91 percent. Nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, by the same metric, average 24.18 percent; European states, 18.35 percent.</p><p>Of course, only the worst-managed or unluckiest American companies actually pay that 38.91 percent. In the 1950s, a third of federal revenues were derived from the corporate income tax. In the mid-1960s, the corporate tax still yielded more revenue than the payroll tax. But since then, revenue collections from the corporate tax have tumbled steeply relative to other tax sources. Today the federal government collects only about 10 percent from the corporate income tax. The payroll tax contributes almost three times as much.</p><p>In the 1960s, the ratio of federal collections between individual and corporate income taxes was about 2 to 1. Since the Great Recession and the lapse of the Bush tax cuts, this ratio <a href="http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/amount-revenue-source">has approximated</a> 5 to 1.</p><p>The paradox of high rates and low yields is explained by the rational lobbying strategy of corporate firms. Business in general would benefit from lower rates. But from the perspective of any individual firm, the highest return on lobbying investment is earned by seeking special favors of value to that particular company or industry. A decade-long effort to reform corporate taxation might reduce the nominal rate to 25 percent. A shrewdly negotiated special favor can cut a company’s tax obligation to zero overnight.</p><p>From the point of view of future U.S. growth and prosperity, the broad outline of tax reform seems obvious. Lower corporate rates to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, the developed-world norm. Tighten collection so that the rate is actually paid. This is one reform that <em>should</em> come near to paying for itself, since collections from the present loopholed system have shrunk to such relatively low levels. Make up any difference by raising other, underperforming taxes, especially excise taxes; while collections from the individual income tax have <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals">doubled</a> since 1997, receipts from the federal excise tax on alcohol have risen only by one-third over the same period.</p><p>Those are changes that could command broad assent. The present Republican plan to <em>use</em> the manifest need for corporate tax reform to shift the burden of the individual income tax from the wealthiest to middle-income families in blue states will not.</p><p>Congressional Republicans well appreciate the unpopularity of what they are doing. That’s why they are short-circuiting the traditional legislative process, bypassing hearings and other opportunities for public comment. The more the public knows, the more jeopardized their plan becomes. Since the Great Recession, the GOP has grown both more extreme in its goals and more radical in its methods. Apocalyptically pessimistic in its view of America’s future, it seems determined to seize for its donors and core constituencies as much as it can, as fast as it can, as ruthlessly as it can. It will then take advantage of the U.S. political system’s notorious antimajoritarian bias in favor of the status quo to defend the grab over the coming years and decades. Repeal and replace failed. The new slogan is: Rush, grab, entrench, and defend.</p><p>Despair is always a bad counselor. This hubris and haste will not deliver the results that U.S. businesses want and that the American public should expect. A normal Republican president would say so. A normal Republican president would enlarge the narrow views of his congressional party—if only to win a second term for himself, but ideally because presidents by their job definition are compelled to think of the wider interests of the nation. But President Trump, elevated by the Electoral College on the basis of a Michael Dukakis–size share of the popular vote, is not only the least public-spirited president in U.S. history, but also the most ignorant and shortsighted. He struck an implicit deal with the congressional Republicans during the campaign of 2016: If they would shield his wrongdoing, he would sign their bills. It’s the one of the rare commitments in his lifetime on which he has not (yet) reneged.</p><p>An opportunity to achieve a sensible improvement by broad consensus is being flung away in favor of accumulating special favors for “special” people. If it succeeds, it will not last. And it probably will not succeed. The differences between the House and the Senate are real; settling them will take time.</p><p>Some Republicans may reason, as Paul Krugman <a href="https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/931226068777930752">tweeted</a> on Thursday, “You might think that growing evidence that 2018 will be a Dem wave would make some Rs break ranks. But here’s the thing: Probably many of those Rs figure that they’ll be wiped out regardless … So if you’re, say, a GOP Congressman from a well-educated, affluent CA district, you might look at VA results and say, ‘Well, by 2019 I’ll be outta here and working as a lobbyist on K Street.’ So keeping the big money happy is what matters.” Not all will think thus, however, and certainly not all will arrive at Krugman’s conclusion equally fast. Vestigial instincts of self-preservation among Republican members of Congress will slow the legislative timetable against the unforgiving clock. It’s very possible, too, that in the face of negative polling, Trump may panic and go back on it, sabotaging the entire project. It’s quite possible that the only legacy of the great tax reform push of 2017 will be raw material for devastating Democratic attack ads in 2018.</p><p>It didn’t have to be this way. It should not be this way.</p><p>A rationally conservative party of business and enterprise could, and should, have written a corporate tax-reform bill that is compelling on the merits. The slowdown of U.S. productivity growth would be the country’s leading problem if U.S. constitutional democracy were not being attacked from the White House at the same time. The GOP submitted to Trump in 2016 very largely to reach this moment. The ironic outcome is that his success that year doomed the very prize for which his party sold its soul.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedAaron P. Bernstein / ReutersRepublicans Are Throwing Away Their Shot at Tax Reform2017-11-20T06:00:00-05:002017-11-20T12:09:19-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-546317There’s a manifest need to lower corporate tax rates—but instead of building consensus, the GOP is pursuing a bill that’s likely to be rolled back even if it passes.<p lang="en"><em>“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that.”—Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin, en route to Hanoi, November 11, 2017.</em></p><p>So, to put it bluntly: At this point in the proceedings, there can be no innocent explanation for Donald Trump’s rejection of the truth about Russian meddling in last year’s elections. Earlier, it may have been suggested, sympathetically, that the case had not yet been proven. That Trump’s vanity blocked him from acknowledging embarrassing facts. Or—more hopefully—that he was inspired by some Kissingerian grand design for a diplomatic breakthrough. Or that he was lazy. Or stubborn. Or uninformed. Or something, anything, other than … complicit. Not anymore.</p><p>As yet, it remains unproven whether Trump himself was personally complicit in Putin’s attack on U.S. democracy as it happened during last year’s presidential campaign.<strong> </strong>What is becoming ever-more undeniable is Trump’s complicity in the attack after the fact—and his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia, and evidently himself. Consider what the president said to reporters on Saturday: <font face="Lyon Display, Georgia, Times, serif"><b>“</b></font>Then you hear it’s 17 agencies [who agree that Russia meddled in the elections], whoa, it’s three. And one is [former CIA Director John] Brennan, and one is whatever. I mean give me a break, they’re political hacks. … So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with that.”</p><p>A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling. The president fired the director of the FBI, confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.</p><p>These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.</p><p>“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard for criminal justice. It’s not the standard for counter-intelligence determinations. The preponderance of the evidence ever-more clearly indicates: In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.</p><p>At any time, this situation would be dire and ominous. It’s graver still at a time when this president seems determined to lead the United States into a preventive war in the Korean peninsula. President Trump may soon demand that this country incur terrible risks and accept heavy sacrifices—even as he leaves Americans in darkening doubt over whose interests he is serving, and why.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedJorge Silva / Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam November 11, 2017.'These Are Not The Actions of an Innocent Man'2017-11-11T12:42:38-05:002017-11-11T12:42:54-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545651Trump’s after-the-fact complicity in Russia’s election meddling is abundantly clear.<p>Sayfullo Saipov did not arrive in the United States alone. In 2009, he was one of 3,284 lucky residents of Uzbekistan to win the green-card lottery. That same year, the lottery <a href="http://www.usadiversitylottery.com/dv2009result.php">granted</a> green cards to—among others—2,894 Albanians, 590 Australians, 1,154 Bulgarians, 4,307 Kenyans, and 2,331 Turks; for a total of 50,000 admissions. </p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Good and bad qualities are randomly distributed in the human population, and randomly is how the diversity lottery distributes its rewards. So it should not be very surprising that one member of the class of ’09 proved to be a mass-murdering terrorist. The lottery imposes no requirements of skill, not even knowledge of English. Convicted criminals are excluded, as are persons affiliated with known terrorist groups. There is a basic health requirement. Beyond that, the system is—as it says right in the title—a lottery, open to anybody with a working Internet connection and $30 for the entry fee.</p><p>You might wonder: Why do we do this? Why would the United States forswear the right to choose the people it admits, to assess them for what they can contribute to the welfare of the community to which they seek entry?</p><p>The answer lies in history, not reason.</p><p>The diversity lottery originated as an attempt to offset the unintended consequences of immigration changes since 1965. The immigration law adopted that year unwittingly—indeed, contrary to the repeated insistences of its authors—reopened the United States to mass immigration. That law gave first priority to the relatives of the most recent immigrants: not only spouses, but also parents, siblings, and then those siblings’ children, including adult children. As a result, the 1965 law tended to bunch the sources of U.S. immigration ever more intensely in a comparative handful of source countries.</p><p>This bias strengthened after the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986. That law conferred legal status on some 3 million unauthorized immigrants, almost all of them Mexican. The back-home kinfolk of the 3 million who received amnesty quickly advanced to the front of the immigration queue.</p><p>Among the groups most irritated by these changes were Irish Americans. Ireland in the mid-1980s remained a poor and depressed country. Many Irish wished to emigrate to the United States, but found the entrance blocked. Their friends in Congress—then Senator Edward Kennedy, then Representative Chuck Schumer—went to work to create a special Irish preference. The diversity lottery was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/diversity-visa-program/544646/?utm_source=feed">their solution</a>.</p><p>Only … it went into effect in 1995, precisely the year that Ireland at last revved into gear as one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. Why leave just as the party was getting good?</p><p>Instead, the diversity lottery discovered a whole new existence, as the favored way for urban Africans to escape their continent. In fiscal year 2015, 10 percent of the population of the Republic of the Congo <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/24/applications-for-u-s-visa-lottery-more-than-doubled-since-2007/">applied</a> for the US diversity lottery, 8 percent of the population of Sierra Leone, and 7 percent of the population of Ghana.</p><p>There may be some cosmic justice in an affirmative-action program for white people converting itself into a golden ticket for the world’s poorest continent. But what American purpose is served? After President Trump’s <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/925684982307348480">outburst on Twitter</a> against the program, many people of goodwill scurried to develop an answer to that question. But as so often with U.S.-immigration policy, these answers are rationalizations after the fact, not arguments before the fact.</p><p>The story of American immigration since 1965 is a story of unintended consequences, yielding results that even their authors would have opposed had they foreseen them. It’s the story of a government program, almost all of whose costs are borne by Americans and almost all of whose benefits are collected by people who were not Americans at the time they received the benefit. It’s the story of a program where it’s considered somehow objectionable even to ask the question, “Why?” The program’s existence has become its own justification. The political clout of the program’s beneficiaries has become the all-purpose answer to questions about its merits.</p><p>This is true of immigration programs generally, but the truth is underscored most heavily in the diversity lottery. While Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others choose their immigrants, the United States is content to let immigrants choose America. Other countries integrate immigration into human capital development strategies alongside prenatal-health programs, preschools, and K-12 education. The United States shrugs off the terrible and intensifying deficits of its native-born population—from obesity through drug abuse to gun massacres—and looks to the virtues of immigrants to compensate for the neglect of its own people.</p><p>Trump’s huge personal unpopularity has this perverse effect: When he endorses something (like Republican tax reform) it loses support; when he attacks something (like transgender soldiers), it rises. But not even Donald Trump can be wrong all the time. By reacting so strongly to him, the American political system forfeits its ability to think for itself. The diversity lottery epitomizes how far U.S. immigration policies have drifted from any purpose or sense.</p><p>As Sayfullo Saipov reminds us, when you admit immigrants without regard to suitability, you receive immigrants without regard to suitability. When you don’t care what you take, you will get what you don’t want. Just this one time, let American policy react to facts and logic, rather than Trump’s ill-considered twitterings.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedAPPresident Lyndon B. Johnson signs the immigration bill on October 3, 1965.The Diversity Visa Program Makes No Sense2017-11-02T16:26:41-04:002017-11-02T16:43:48-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544850The immigration lottery epitomizes how far U.S. policies have drifted from any purpose.<p>“Senator, I wonder if I could get a comment … "</p><p>Click.</p><p>That little scene is being enacted<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/democrats-warn-trump-leave-mueller-alone/544352/?utm_source=feed"> in one form or another</a> across Washington on Monday, following the indictments of three former Trump campaign officials. Reporters are seeking comment from Republican officeholders. Republican officeholders are desperately eluding reporters, conforming to the maxim often attributed to Calvin Coolidge, “You don’t have to explain what you never said.”</p><p>Yet what is usually good advice can become, when it fails, spectacularly bad advice. Today is such a day.</p><p>The advice I want to offer here is not directed to the brave senator or the principled senator. It is directed to the run-of-the-mill senator—the prudent senator, the self-preserving senator. If you keep quiet today, you are putting yourself in jeopardy. Events are about to start moving very fast, and if you miss this moment, you will find yourself carried along by those events to places where it is not healthy for you to travel.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Here’s your problem, senator: The Trump political and legal strategy is about to get very radical. This weekend, after months of hesitation and distraction mongering, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page ran a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/begging-your-pardon-mr-president-1509302308">column</a> advocating the end-the-probe, pardon-everyone position. It also mobilized an array of high-toned op-ed contributors—acclaimed intellectuals, well-known lawyers—in support. Fox News will amplify the argument, your constituents will be mobilized to support it—and you will be trapped. You may think you are biding your time. In reality, you will find that you have preemptively surrendered to an internal takeover.</p><p>Look, we all get that you have donors breathing down your neck demanding a tax cut. They gave you money, now it’s your turn to return the favor. You don’t want to focus on presidential misdeeds until you have delivered on your top priority. But by the time you are ready to move, things will have moved against you.</p><p>President Trump has no fact-based defense. The soap-bubble distractions floated by Fox News and in-the-tank pundits—Uranium One! Dossier!—pop as soon as they meet bright sunlight. Trump has already confessed on national television that he fired Comey to shut down the Russia inquiry. Today’s Papadopoulos indictment brings forth still more evidence that Trump feared the Russia inquiry because of the contacts it might uncover between his campaign and Russia: “On or about June 19, 2016, after several email and Skype exchanges with the former Russian MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] Connection, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed the High-Ranking Campaign Official, with the subject line, ‘New message from Russia’: ‘The Russian ministry of foreign affairs messaged me and said that if Mr. Trump is unable to make it to Russia, if a campaign rep (more or someone else) can make it for meetings? I am willing to make the trip off the record if it’s in the interest of Mr. Trump and the campaign to meet specific people.’”</p><p>So Trump is likely to adopt a self-defense based on huge assertions of arbitrary power. “A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey.” Those words appeared in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/begging-your-pardon-mr-president-1509302308">a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> op-ed</a> posted Sunday afternoon by two well-known Republican lawyers. They are about to become the official White House position—and when they do, you’ll find yourself with little maneuvering room to prevent them from becoming your position as well. You will have to haul that position along with you into the 2018 elections, or (even more dangerously) the elections in 2020 or 2022, by which time even more of this scandal will have come to light.</p><p>You need to wonder whether the avoidance of blowback from Fox News in November 2017 is worth the risks hurtling at you in the weeks ahead. The Trump administration’s authoritarian moment is on the verge of materializing. The president seems likely to openly stake a claim to use his position as head of the executive branch to exempt himself from all law enforcement. If the president can never obstruct justice, he can use the pardon power to protect himself and his associates from any investigation into criminal wrongdoing.</p><p>By speaking out today, you may dissuade the White House from staking the whole Republican Party to an authoritarian, anticonstitutional position. At a minimum, you protect yourself from answering for it. Nobody’s asking you to be a hero. Just think ahead beyond the next 10 minutes and 10 days to your own interests and future.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersA lawmaker exits the Senate chamberStaying Silent May Backfire Spectacularly on Republican Lawmakers2017-10-30T13:54:54-04:002017-10-30T14:47:50-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544382Usually, laying low during controversies is a savvy move for legislators. But when it comes to Trump and Russia, it brings its own risks.<p>“Why didn’t he do it before?”</p><p>“Why doesn’t he stay and fight?”</p><p>“Why does he still vote with the president on taxes and judges?”</p><p>Those are the questions asked when a Republican official breaks with President Trump. They are fair questions too, as far as they go, and they will only become fairer over time. October 2017 is already late to recognize Donald Trump for what he is and what he is doing, and next year will be later, and the year after that later still. Someday, I’m sure, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will unburden himself of the agonies he felt during all the time he enabled and empowered this president to do the harm under which Ryan writhed.</p><p>Yet from a political rather than a moral point of view, the question, “Where were you when it counted?” is the wrong question. It always counts. It counted then, it counts now, it will count in future.</p><p>In an Aaron Sorkin movie, that speech of Jeff Flake’s would bring traffic to a stop. That’s not how such things work in life. Statements like his exert a cumulative influence. They show up in ads, in Facebook videos, in late-night comedy bits. They grind away, creating a public image out of hundreds of millions of individual impressions.</p><p>Trump ran in 2016 as a peace candidate, against a Hillary Clinton who would drag the U.S. into another Middle Eastern war. Now a Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman of his own party has warned that it is Trump who will bumble into World War III. Trump presented himself as a blunt, no-nonsense type, maybe not politically correct, but who’ll tell it like it is. He’s now seen as honest and trustworthy by <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/25/trump-poll-reckless-honest-244126">barely one-third</a> of those surveyed. Trump outperformed Romney among blacks and Hispanics. Quinnipiac this summer <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2482">found</a> that more than 60 percent of Americans agreed that Trump was intentionally enflaming anti-minority feeling in the United States.</p><p>A famous line of Ernest Hemingway’s describes how a rich man goes broke: “Two ways … Gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how defeat comes upon a president as well. The live question for Trumpists in 2018 will be whether they can hold onto both chambers of Congress and thereby continue to stifle investigations into presidential wrongdoing. The geographic map is in the GOP’s favor in 2018, but the demographic map increasingly is not. The voters who hear of and are swayed by comments like Flake’s and Corker’s—more educated, more affluent—are precisely those most likely to show up in an off-year election. Trump and the GOP will not lose all of them. They cannot afford to lose very many of them.</p><p>You don’t lose power by losing your base. Herbert Hoover held 39.7 percent of the vote in 1932, a year when Americans were literally going hungry. You lose power by losing the less intensely committed, just enough of them to tip the balance against you. Flake, Corker, and the others are working on those less intensely committed, at the 52 percent of Republicans who <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/194738/less-half-republicans-pleased-trump-nominee.aspx">as late as August 2016</a> still wished their party had nominated someone else.</p><p>Anti-Trump Republicans remain a minority in their party. Outspoken anti-Trump Republicans constitute an even smaller minority. Minorities cannot elect presidents. But they can thwart them. In 1884, Republicans aghast at the corruption of their party’s presidential nominee, James G. Blaine, were derided as “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/bring-back-the-mugwumps/307842/?utm_source=feed">mugwumps</a>”: snobbish, blundering, goody-goodies. There were never very many of them, and they nearly all lived in New York City, within a few blocks of each other. They sufficed to tip New York State to Grover Cleveland by just 1,047 votes—and with New York’s electoral votes, the presidential election.</p><p>Steve Bannon and his ilk have this idea that they can make the Republican Party stronger by driving out of it all those who admire John McCain, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, and other traditional Republicans. That trick only works, though, if a party can attract more new voters than it loses. There is no evidence that the Trumpist project is doing anything like that. There are no “Trump Democrats,” only disaffected, disaffiliated, non-college-educated whites weakly committed to the political process and unlikely to show up to vote next November.</p><p>The straw that breaks the camel’s back is always preceded by thousands of other straws that did not. Jeff Flake’s speech is not that last straw. Bob Corker’s interview is not the last straw, either. But they are two more straws among the accumulating many under which the camel is already buckling—and there are cartloads more still waiting to be loaded atop the sagging beast.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedWin McNamee / Getty / Katie Martin / The AtlanticJeff Flake Lays Another Straw on the Camel's Back2017-10-25T12:20:18-04:002017-10-26T09:48:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543957The senator's speech won’t be the last straw—but it adds its weight to the growing pile.<p>I met the future prime minister of the Czech Republic early in 2014, at a Washington, D.C. breakfast organized by the “No Labels” movement. Andrej Babis had recently been appointed his nation’s finance minister. He and the No Labels organizers had met at a conference in Europe and been mutually fascinated by each other’s promises of trans-ideological problem-solving.</p><p>I wasn’t as impressed. Babis looked to me less like a problem solver, more like an example of the problem to be solved. Babis had become very rich, very fast, in a very murky way. A hereditary member of the pre-1989 communist elite, in the post-communist scramble he had gained managerial control of very valuable state assets, including the great preponderance of the country’s agricultural land. Through complex financial transactions, he soon emerged as those assets’ outright owner—and reputedly his country’s richest or second-richest man. At every step of the way, Babis was dogged by accusations of financial fraud and past <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/czech-pm-candidate-to-face-secret-police-trial-again/2017/10/12/97bc4fe2-af2c-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html?utm_term=.4156584273c3">collaboration</a> with the communist-era secret police—accusations he <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/czech-parliament-lifts-andrej-babis-immunity-opening-door-to-fraud-charges/a-40389085">dismisses</a> as the work of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.</p><p>The self-promotion of the former communist elite into a new post-communist ownership elite ranked high among populist grievances everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Babis responded to these resentments with his own distinctive approach to problem-solving: He <a href="https://rsf.org/en/news/local-oligarch-conflicts-interest-dominate-czech-media">purchased</a> almost all the Czech Republic’s media—one of its largest radio stations, its two most influential daily newspapers, and its most popular news website, among other properties.</p><p>Following the example of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Babis then parlayed media power into political power. He founded his own political party, ANO, which is both an acronym in Czech for “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” and also the Czech word for “yes.” ANO gained almost 19 percent of the vote in the 2013 Czech parliamentary elections, elevating the party to become the second in parliament and Babis himself to the finance ministry and deputy prime ministership.</p><p>Needless to say, the man across the breakfast table from me in 2014 did not care to address any of these issues. Nor did he have a compelling explanation of what his party intended to do to redress the “dissatisfaction” he observed about him in the Czech Republic. He spoke little, and what he did say was vague. “Enigmatic” is a word that recurs often in profiles of Babis, but “elusive” might be more exact.</p><p>The Czech Republic seemed a poor location for anti-institutional politics.</p><p>Unlike Hungary, which elected Viktor Orban in 2010, the Czech economy had generally performed well since 1989, and especially since it emerged from <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4615-0343-9_10">currency and banking crises</a> in 1997. The republic joined the European Union in 2004, but did not qualify for the euro—thus escaping the deflation inflicted on other small European countries after 2010. Over the past few years, the Czech Republic has boasted one of the highest growth rates and lowest unemployment rates on the European continent.</p><p>Unlike Poland, which turned to the authoritarian Law and Justice Party in 2015, the Czech Republic lacks a large non-metropolitan hinterland whose people feel left behind by the prosperity of the urban centers. Prague alone <a href="https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/25964515/33012014chen.pdf/dbf6c64f-12f1-4b53-b7c9-d5f4ecb8827d?version=1.2">accounts for</a> 12 percent of the population of the republic; by contrast, only 4.5 percent of Poles live in Warsaw. The country’s former mining and heavy industrial regions were sliced away to form the separate republic of Slovakia in 1993—and unsurprisingly, independent Slovakia has proved susceptible to authoritarian politics and Russian covert influence.</p><p>And yet, the Czechs—whose country has long been regarded as the model democracy of central Europe—have not proven immune to authoritarian politics and Russian influence. In 2012, the republic altered its constitution to provide for the direct election of the country’s president. The Czech presidency is mostly a ceremonial role, but it does command some important powers—and the very great prestige of having been held by Vaclav Havel for a decade. In the first election to fill the presidency, 2013, the Czechs turned to the thuggish Milos Zeman. <a href="https://twitter.com/MichalKubal/status/921371033340383232">Here</a>’s a photograph of him posing with a mock assault rifle labeled “At Journalists.” Many of Zeman’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/world/europe/milos-zeman-journalists.html">long roster</a> of offensive remarks can be chalked up to his <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324457/Drunk-Czech-president-Milos-Zeman-hardly-stand-ceremonial-occasion.html">notorious drinking habits</a>, but he was not drunk when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/europe/czech-republic-russia-milos-zeman.html">he allowed</a> his closest political aide to accept millions of dollars of gifts from a Russian state-owned oil company. Zeman has disported himself as one of Putin’s most outspoken allies inside the European Union, in particular as an opponent of the sanctions imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.</p><p>Despite these antics, the Czech Republic’s democratic identity seemed securely anchored in a multiparty political system dominated by pro-EU parties of the moderate left and center. So long as those parties retained their strength and credibility, the loud-mouthery of its sottish president could be winced at, but need not inspire much worry. The country’s past three prime ministers have all been conventional European politicians, who—under a Social Democratic political label—followed a consistent line of policy committed to the rule of law and favorable to economic growth.</p><p>That left and center was decimated in 2017. The Social Democratic party dropped from largest party in Parliament to sixth, the result of a plunge of 70 percent in its raw vote total. The traditional party of the moderate right, the Civic Democratic party, did gain seats over its 2013 result, but still barely outpolled the Czech Republic’s party of the authoritarian, anti-immigrant far right.</p><p>Babis’s ANO won more than the Social Democrats and Civic Democrats combined. He won more than any party at all in the elections of 2013 and 2010. How did he do it? The short answer is that he did not do it. The respectable democratic leaders of the European Union did it for him, by failing to respond to mass migration from Africa and the Middle East.</p><p>When I met Babis, the great surge of migration into Europe from Libya and Syria were accelerating, heading to the crisis of 2015. To that point, immigration had not been a Babis theme. He had no issues, only a slogan: “Bude lip,” it will be better. Babis limitlessly believed in himself, and equally limitlessly believed that all opposition to his wishes—including his investigation for subsidy fraud—was the work of a sinister conspiracy against him.</p><p>Then, in 2015, he found his issue: immigration. The escalating influx of migrants across the Mediterranean had come to a climax that summer in a spectacular miscalculation by German chancellor Angela Merkel.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>To that point, people who arrived on European shores to claim asylum were stopped at the first country they reached: typically Italy or Greece. Under EU law, they had no right to move from their first “safe country” to another. But asylum-seekers were of course also seeking economic opportunities, which is why they did not always stop at the first country of refuge—and that meant transit from the depressed economies of southern Europe to the strong economies of the north, especially the United Kingdom, Sweden, and above all, Germany. They began to move north, illegally, often on foot. On August 25, 2015, in an effort to relieve pressure on its harder-pressed neighbors, the German government made a fateful decision: Syrian citizens who had arrived in Europe would henceforward be allowed to enter Germany to apply for asylum there. That decision, announced in a tweet from the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, almost instantly <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/obscure-german-tweet-help-spur-migrant-march-from-hungary-1441901563">sparked</a> one of the greatest mass movements of people since 1945. Young men from Sri Lanka to Senegal cashed everything they and their families had to make the move to Europe to present themselves as “Syrian refugees” seeking entry into the German job market. Almost 2 million people would arrive in Germany before the flow was finally halted in later 2016. (After deducting foreign nationals who exited Germany—mostly people from other EU countries returning home—the population impact <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/sharp-drop-in-migrant-arrivals-in-germany/a-37087543">netted out</a> at some 1.2 million new arrivals.)</p><p>Staggered and surprised by the movement they had triggered, German officials cast about for ways to share the load—notably by pressing other European countries with strong job markets to accept a quota of the 2015-2016 arrivals. They looked especially hard at the countries of Central Europe. These countries had received billions of euros of EU aid since 2004. Now was the time for them to lend a hand, or else face a cut in their subsidies from the EU and the German taxpayer.</p><p>The conventional parties of central Europe acceded to this pressure, opening the political way to a surge in authoritarian populism in every country from the Aegean to the Baltic. </p><p>Anti-refugee feeling turned about the fortunes of Viktor Orban, which had been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/world/europe/hungary-drops-internet-tax-plan-after-surge-of-protests.html">sagging</a> in Hungary after a failed attempt in 2014 to impose heavy taxes on internet use. Anti-refugee feeling delivered an unprecedented majority of the vote to the reactionary and authoritarian Law and Justice party in the Polish elections of October 2015. Anti-refugee feeling prevailed in Austria, where on October 16 an absolute majority of the population <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/austrian-election-yields-a-hard-right-turn-as-conservative-and-nationalist-parties-gain/2017/10/15/d1dce850-ad22-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html?nid&amp;utm_term=.e562745f0038">voted</a> for immigration restrictionist parties: 31.6 percent for the People’s Party, and 27.4 percent for the Freedom Party—once such a pariah that in the year 2000 the rest of the EU sanctioned Austria for allowing Freedom Party members into a coalition government.</p><p>You don’t need to be a weatherman to see the way the wind blows. In January 2016, Andrej Babis announced his new conviction in an interview with a Czech newspaper (their translation):</p><blockquote>
<p>We are not duty-bound to accept anyone and we are not even now able to do so. Our primary responsibility is to make sure that our own citizens are safe. The Czech Republic has enough of its own problems, people living on the breadline, single mothers. The West European politicians keep repeating that it is our duty to comply with what the immigrants want because of their human rights. But what about the human rights of the Germans or the Hungarians? Why should the British accept that the wealth which has been created by many generations of their ancestors, should be consumed by people without any relationship to that country and its culture? People who are a security risk and whose desire it is not to integrate but to destroy European culture?</p>
</blockquote><p>The one-time trans-ideological problem-solver had reinvented himself as a populist nationalist. Babis would escalate this messaging over the months leading to the October 21, 2017, parliamentary vote. "I have stopped believing in successful integration and multiculturalism,” <a href="http://www.praguemonitor.com/2016/08/04/ano-leader-calls-parliamentary-debate-immigrant-quotas">he posted</a> on Facebook in the summer of 2016. “We must do our utmost to reject migrants, including the quotas in which we were outvoted. I want to reject the quotas even at the cost of sanctions.”</p><p>“We have to fight for what our ancestors built here,” Babis <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-25/-we-don-t-want-the-euro-says-czech-tycoon-poised-to-be-premier">told journalists</a> at a conference in Prague in June 2017. “If there will be more Muslims than Belgians in Brussels, that’s their problem. I don’t want that here. They won’t be telling us who should live here.”</p><p>Babis was never a true believer in the far right. He is not a true believer in anything. While he rejected EU resettlement quotas and opposed adoption of the euro currency, he did not share the more ideological anti-EU position of the rest of the European far right. “They give us money,” <a href="http://politicalcritique.org/cee/czech-republic/2016/meet-andrej-babis/">he said</a> of the EU in October 2016, “so our membership is advantageous for us.” What Babis offered Czechs was all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs. If that position was unrealistic … well, that was information that could await the post-election period.</p><p>Two questions now overhang Czech politics. The first is the character of the government Babis will form. It takes 101 seats to constitute a parliamentary majority in Prague. Babis commands only 78. He has a choice of coalition partners: some conventional parties, others more disturbing. He has in the past speculated about changes in the Czech constitution. Will he try to follow the Polish and Hungarian path? Or will he abide by the existing rules of the game?</p><p>The second question is the more haunting—and is the question that validates Babis’s title as “the Czech Trump.” Politicians like Trump and Babis are brought to the fore by public disgust with politics as usual. “It’s a rigged system, folks!” as Trump so caustically said. Their own careers are proof of how rigged the system is. Misconduct leads to cynicism which enables misconduct, in a spiraling doom for constitutional democracy. Will the investigation into charges that Babis diverted EU subsidies be permitted to go forward? Or will justice in the Czech Republic be politicized as it has been in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia? Will the Czechs perceive that the true “rigged system” is this closed loop of rationalization for wrong? If they can perceive it, can they act to halt the cycle and save themselves? Can any of us?</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedMilan Kammermayer / ReutersAndrej Babis arrives for a live broadcast of a debate before the country's parliamentary election in Prague, Czech Republic, on October 19, 2017. The Toxic Politics of Migration in the Czech Republic2017-10-23T11:30:32-04:002017-10-24T17:43:28-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543669Another anti-establishment politician comes to power in Europe—raising questions about the state of constitutional democracy.<p>President Donald Trump’s October 13 Iran announcement qualifies as maybe his least abnormal national-security action.</p><p>On Iran—unlike almost any other national security issue—Trump has overseen something like a policy debate, arriving at something like an intermediate position. The Iran deal will not be canceled, it will be continued. At the same time, new actions will be taken to deal with urgent U.S. security concerns that the deal ignored.</p><p>Since the deal went into effect in mid-2015, some of its U.S. authors’ hopes have been realized; other hopes disappointed. The rulers of Iran did surrender most of its enriched uranium stockpile. They submitted at least in theory to nuclear inspections.</p><p>But in other crucial respects, the Iranian regime’s behavior has become more aggressive and more dangerous. The deal returned tens of billions of frozen assets—including upwards of $1 billion <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sent-two-more-planeloads-of-cash-to-iran-after-initial-payment-1473208256">in literal cash</a>—to the Islamic Republic. That money has helped fund a radical <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/world/middleeast/iranian-parliament-facing-us-sanctions-vote-to-raise-defense-spending.html">increase</a> in Iran's military budget. The Iranian state has accelerated its testing of ballistic missiles. It has fought—and nearly won—a war in Syria to save its client Bashar al-Assad. Its surrogates in Yemen have begun <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-houthis-fifth-fleet-admiral.html">firing missiles</a> into Saudi Arabia, and Iranian-backed militias inside Syria are <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-to-let-iranian-backed-militias-within-10-km-of-golan-heights-report/">moving closer</a> to the borders of Jordan and Israel—reportedly 10 kilometers away from the Golan Heights.</p><p>Critics of the deal have accepted that, however strongly they opposed entering into it, once entered, the costs of exiting will be too high. In a tough <a href="https://www.cfr.org/event/conversation-iran-nuclear-deal-senator-tom-cotton">speech</a> to the Council on Foreign Relations on October 3, the deal’s foremost congressional critic—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas—specifically repudiated recession of the deal. “Instead of that backward-looking step, which the president also has in his power to do right now, let me suggest that we look to the future and a new approach.”</p><p>The new approach Cotton has urged—and that the Trump administration contemplates—is to threaten new contingent sanctions on Iran if it continues to aggress. Cotton identified three areas where the deal must be stiffened: It must be made permanent, rather than (as parts of it now do) sunsetting in 2025; inspections must be extended throughout Iran not just to places that were nuclear sites before 2015; and Iran’s missile programs must be limited.</p><p>Cotton is not adventuring here. He is expressing themes that command broad support within the U.S. national-security community. In a September 2015 <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/events/hillary-clinton-addresses-the-iran-nuclear-deal/">speech</a> at the Brookings Institution on the Iran deal, candidate Clinton explicitly promised to work with deal-skeptics like Cotton to tighten pressure on Iran—and to maintain the threat of force should the Iranian regime seek to cheat.</p><blockquote>
<p>[I]t’s not enough just to say “yes” to this deal. Of course it isn’t. We have to say “yes, and.” “Yes, and” we will enforce it with vigor and vigilance. “Yes, and” we will embed it in a broader strategy to confront Iran’s bad behavior in the region. “Yes, and” we will begin from day one to set the conditions so Iran knows it will never be able to get a nuclear weapon, not during the term of the agreement, not after, not ever.</p>
<p>We need to be clear and I think we need to make that very clear to Iran about what we expect from them. This is not the start of some larger diplomatic opening and we shouldn’t expect that this deal will lead to broader changes in their behavior. That shouldn’t be a promise for proceeding. Instead, we need to be prepared for three scenarios: first, Iran tries to cheat, something it’s been quite willing to do in the past; second, Iran tries to wait us out, perhaps it waits to move for 15 years when some, but not all, restrictions expire; and, third, Iran ramps up its dangerous behavior in the region, including its support for terrorists groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah. …</p>
<p>My starting point will be one of distrust. You remember President Reagan’s line about the Soviets, “Trust, but verify”? My approach will be distrust and verify. We should anticipate that Iran will test the next President. They’ll want to see how far they can bend the rules. That won’t work if I’m in the White House. I’ll hold the line against Iranian noncompliance. That means penalties even for small violations; keeping our allies on board, but being willing to snap back sanctions into place, unilaterally, if we have to; working with Congress to close any gaps in the sanctions. Right now members of Congress are offering proposals to that effect and I think the current administration should work with them to see whether there are additional steps that could be taken.</p>
</blockquote><p>But here’s where we come to the waste and risk of the Trump presidency. It’s one thing to announce a tougher policy; another to implement.</p><p>For all its sometime over-eagerness to reach a deal with Iran, the Obama administration can take credit for one great success: broad global support for its Iran sanction regime. That regime has been relaxed since 2015. To restore it will need the assent of the European Union, as well as at least some cooperation from other global powers, including China, Japan, and India—respectively the 1st, 3rd, and 4th-ranking <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/feb/06/iran-oil-exports-destination">markets</a> for Iranian oil export before international sanctions bit.</p><p>The Trump administration has shown some ability to build international sanctions regimes when it must. It <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-eases-u-n-measure-on-north-korea-to-coax-votes-from-china-russia-1505159014">has done so</a> against North Korea. But North Korea is not an oil exporter. Against Iran, the task will be much more difficult—and the requirement of U.S. credibility that much higher. That was Hillary Clinton’s warning in 2015:</p><blockquote>
<p>The Iranians and the world need to understand that we will act decisively if we need to, so here’s my message to Iran’s leaders: The United States will never allow you to acquire a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>As President I will take whatever actions are necessary to protect the United States and our allies. I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon. And I will set up my successor to be able to credibly make the same pledge. We will make clear to Iran that our national commitment to prevention will not waiver depending on who’s in office. It’s permanent. And should it become necessary in the future, having exhausted peaceful alternatives to turn to military force, we will have preserved and, in some cases, enhanced our capacity to act. And because we’ve proven our commitment to diplomacy first, the world will more likely join us.</p>
</blockquote><p>The Trump administration, by contrast, is not seen as a good-faith actor, never mind by America’s enemies, but also by its friends. It’s one thing to announce new plans against Iran, another and much more challenging to implement them, more challenging still to gain international support. Even when Trump speaks sense, there’s no trusting his execution of those words. The likeliest outcome is not enhanced U.S. security, but two nuclear crises at the same time, one in North East Asia and a second in the Middle East.</p>David Frumhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/?utm_source=feedRaheb Homavandi / ReutersA ceremony marking the 37th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, in Tehran on February 11, 2016.Trump's Iran Strategy Would Be Smart—If He Were Credible2017-10-13T12:37:21-04:002017-10-13T12:38:11-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-542886Even when the president speaks sense, there’s no trusting his execution of those words.